


Give Way

by wallmakerrelict



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Epilogue? What epilogue?, F/M, Gen, M/M, POV Alternating, Pregnancy, alternate version of the S8 finale, canonverse alternate realities, there's some alternate-reality Shadam but it's endgame Sheith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:35:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 37,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21997597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wallmakerrelict/pseuds/wallmakerrelict
Summary: Honerva has created a portal that will tear apart existence in order to find her a reality in which she can have a second chance. As the paladins follow her through, the portal splits Voltron apart, throwing them into separate realities. Each ends up in a version of their past or future that correlates with a single, deep-seated wish.To stop Honerva, they must escape from these realities. Or, decide if they want to.
Relationships: Allura/Lance (Voltron), Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 140
Kudos: 193





	1. Lance

As Haggar entered the portal, her ship was gripped by an overpowering force. Her old reality faded behind her, all its absurd tragedy and violence reduced to a single mote in a swirling cloud of possibilities. New realities flashed by her as strobes of light and color. Brief impressions of dozens of worlds, entire universes. Time and space bowed and cracked as she passed through them. Each was beautiful and unique and utterly meaningless to her. She only cared about one.

There was a place in the multiverse where her family existed untouched by death, ambition, and war. Where Lotor had yet to be ruined by Zarkon’s hatred and Haggar’s indifference. That was where the portal was carrying her. She’d programmed her ship to take her back to the start. A do-over of her life with the worst elements eliminated.

But it was not a clean doorway. It was a drill boring a hole through time and space. Dozens, hundreds, countless other realities trembled in her wake. The shockwaves of her passage would shatter their very foundations. What happened to them afterwards, Haggar didn’t care. She was already through to the next, and then the next. It mattered little whether every reality in existence were snuffed out, as long as one perfect timeline remained.

Her breakneck tear through realities stopped with a silent explosion of color and light. The ship was gone. In its place a peaceful scene surrounded her: bright daylight, amber sky, fluttering grass on rolling hills and rocky plateaus. The colors and the landscape were familiar. Daibazaal.

The change was so abrupt that she stumbled and almost fell. But the ground was solid under her feet, a warm breeze tugged at her hair, and a gentle hand caught her by the shoulder.

“Careful, my love,” said a voice she had not heard in millennia.

It was Zarkon. But not the warlord a universe had learned to fear, nor the half-dead monster she had eventually made of him. His eyes were wide and clear. His face open and innocent. His voice strong and kind. After so many lifetimes knowing only the twisted perversion of her husband, she was unprepared to come face to face with the man she’d fallen in love with.

“Thank you,” she managed to say. She put one hand on Zarkon’s arm to steady herself. As she planted her feet and straightened her shaking knees, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror shine of Zarkon’s royal armor.

And there was another face she’d all but forgotten. An Altean woman, beautiful in her youth, curious and bright. Bouncy violet hair instead of the stringy white locks to which she’d become accustomed. Little crescent moons under her eyes instead of tear tracks streaking down her cheeks. No hint of the dark quintessence that had turned her into an immortal husk.

Honerva. Love welled in her heart for that face as it had for Zarkon’s. Both of them were ghosts made flesh. Beautiful people in a beautiful time of their lives, heedless of the uncaring universe that threatened to twist them into travesties of themselves.

She had doomed so many realities to wear this face again. Too many people to count would soon wink out of existence. Entire histories, cultures, star systems, and the framework that held them together. Gone. All to grant one broken woman her selfish wish.

“Mother!”

She whipped around, almost falling again, to look farther up the path where the sweet, childlike voice had come from. Her son was running back toward her. Not the cold, vengeful man she’d remembered too late. Not the desecrated remains she’d pulled out of the quintessence field. This was the little boy she’d never gotten a chance to love. Running toward her, carefree and smiling, his feet barely touching the ground in his haste to reach the mother he adored.

Honerva knelt and opened her arms. Lotor crashed into her embrace, laughing.

Elsewhere, universes disintegrated.

It was worth it.

* * *

Lance opened his eyes.

The last thing he remembered was being aboard the Red Lion, hurtling through realities in the wake of Haggar’s ship. Now he was face-down on a thin pillow and over-starched sheets. He would have recognized the smell of that detergent anywhere. He was in the Galaxy Garrison.

He rolled out of bed, alert for a trap or ambush. But he was alone. The room looked like the private quarters they’d given him when he’d returned to Earth as a paladin. But while that room had stayed pretty bare in the short months he’d spent there, this one had clearly been lived in for some time. The desk was covered in papers and knick-knacks, and frames decorated the walls.

The most prominent wall hanging caught his eye for the fact that it had his name on it, in the middle of the sheet, surrounded by ornate borders and smaller lettering. He crossed the room to peer at it more closely. It was a diploma. Graduation from the Garrison college, with honors and immediate commission as a lieutenant.

He scanned the rest of the walls. Certificates, commendations, newspaper clippings. All bearing his name. Lance, the prodigy of the Galaxy Garrison. Its most promising young pilot. Earth’s best hope for innovation in space travel.

Before Lance could properly absorb what he was seeing, the ringing of a telephone made him jump. He shuffled the mess on his desk around until he found the phone and reflexively put it to his ear.

“Hello?”

“Good morning!” It was his mom. “Just checking that you submitted your health report. Veronica said you’d forgotten, and your commander wanted it by today.”

Lance swept a hand over the papers on his desk. Near the top of the pile was a stapled packet from the Garrison medical services. It gave him a clean bill of health, and the top page marked him as cleared for space travel. “I… I’ve got it here,” he mumbled. “I’ll turn it in right now.”

“Good boy. Ah, I’m so proud of you! The first person in our family to go to space! Now, don’t forget to get back to me about the menu for your party. Your launch date is coming up, and I still have a lot of planning to do.”

“I will, mom,” he said automatically. Even to his own ears, his voice sounded dazed. Even after his mom had hung up, he held the phone and stared at it for a long time.

Something had gone terribly wrong.

Wandering around the halls of the Garrison was a new experience in this reality. Lance had opened the drawers back in his quarters looking for his orange cadet uniform, only to find a gray tailored coat with officer’s stripes on the shoulders. He felt like an imposter wearing it, but the cadets who passed him in the halls didn’t seem to think so. Their eyes lit up as he approached, a few waved, and two pretty girls giggled when he waved back at them. Even the teachers and officers stopped to acknowledge him.

“Launch date’s coming up!” Professor Montgomery said, slapping him jovially on the back. “You feeling nervous yet?”

Lance tried to laugh, but it came out as a high-pitched groan. “You have no idea.”

He’d walked in circles a few times, pinballing around the hallways he’d used to frequent, before he realized that he had no idea where he was going. He wasn’t even sure where the Lance from this reality was supposed to be right now, let alone what he should do about it. He had to figure out how to get back to Voltron and Atlas. He had to save the universe. He had to find Allura.

His stomach rumbled. Thank god. At least that was one problem he knew how to solve.

He headed to the cafeteria and started to feel better as he loaded up a tray with food. He was sure he’d come up with a plan after he’d eaten.

Turns out, he didn’t even have to wait that long. When he turned to look for an open table, he spotted Pidge and Hunk sitting together against the far wall. Lance had to stop himself from vaulting over the tables to reach them. Instead, he scooted and slid between the other diners until he was able to plop down beside his friends.

“Man, am I glad to see you two!” he sighed as he started to eat. “What the hell is going on?!”

Pidge was staring at him with a confused smile. “That’s what I was going to ask you. Don’t you have drills this morning?”

“Forget drills,” said Lance. “We have to figure out how we got here and how to get back to Voltron. Where’s Allura? Where’s Shiro?”

The smile disappeared off Pidge’s face. “What are you talking about? Shiro’s gone.”

“Aw, man, we’re in the past, aren’t we? Is he even back from Kerberos yet?”

Pidge had been raising her glass to drink, but at that she slammed it back down on the table. Abandoning it and her tray, she marched from the cafeteria before Lance could so much as shout after her.

Hunk stayed, though his hands were raised and his eyes squinted as he cringed. “Lance!” he scolded. “You’re going to space in a few weeks. Pidge is already worried about you. Why would you bring up Kerberos to her? You know her family died on that mission.”

“But they didn’t!” Lance protested. He could see now that hadn’t been his version of Pidge, and this wasn’t his version of Hunk, but the realization didn’t stop his frustration. How could he make them understand? How could he explain everything they’d gone through in the last few years? They’d grown and changed so much together. He needed them to be the friends he’d come to rely on.

“Are you okay?” said Hunk. “I know you’ve been under a lot of pressure lately. You’ve got one more psych eval scheduled before launch, right?”

Lance brushed his concern aside to impatiently forge ahead. “I’m fine, I’m fine. Hunk, listen. What about Keith? He has to be here, right?”

“Who?”

“Keith! You know – grumpy guy, mullet, problems with authority, crazy talented pilot?”

“Oh…” said Hunk, furrowing his brow as he thought about it. Then it came to him. “Oh wow, that homeless kid Shiro sponsored? Geez, I’d forgotten about him since he washed out. I guess he was good, but he wasn’t as talented as you are, Lance.”

Lance sputtered, too upset to accept the long-awaited compliment, and wolfed down the rest of his food in silence.

He tried to find out more, but being the Garrison’s golden boy was a serious distraction. Wherever he went, people recognized him and reminded him of where he was supposed to be. He couldn’t sneak, snoop, or even blend into a crowd. He ended up in a PT workout, a mission briefing, and a flight simulator scenario just because he kept getting pulled aside by superior officers who were over-invested in his future. He longed for the days when Shiro, and then Keith, and then James had gotten all the attention, and Lance had been able to fly under the instructors’ radar.

The sun was starting to set by the time Lance’s duties finally seemed to be winding down and he was able to slink to the hoverbike garage. He asked the attendant about a rental, hoping the wad of money he’d found in his uniform pocket would be enough to cover the charge.

The attendant, confused, held out a set of keys with Lance’s name stamped onto the chain. “Don’t you want your own?”

Lance snatched the keys and wandered the garage, clicking the remote until blinking headlights led him to a shiny, royal-blue hoverbike. Okay, so this reality did have a few perks.

The engine purred under him as he steered the bike past the Garrison walls and out into the darkening desert. The farther he got from the floodlights, the more stars emerged. He glanced up at them as he drove. His heart had always ached to fly among them, but now that ache gripped him with a greater urgency than he’d ever felt before. The stars were not a remote and glorious idea to him anymore. They were something much more concrete and personal.

Allura. She was out there, sleeping on Arus, on the other side of the cosmos. She would know what to do. And if she didn’t, if he was truly stuck here, then nothing mattered more than being with her. He didn’t care what Earth had to offer him in this or any reality. The Galaxy Garrison could not take him to her side. Only Voltron could do that.

The Blue Lion was out here, hidden under the desert rock. That had been the turning point of his life, when he’d left his old ambitions behind and given himself to a bigger purpose and a stronger love than he’d ever imagined possible. He knew where to find it. He just needed the paladins. He already knew where two of them were, and a third was not far off.

It was dark by the time he pulled up to the little shack in the desert valley. It had been hard to find. He’d only been there once before, but when he saw it, he knew it was the right place. He’d never forget that first night all five of them had come together, about to embark on the journey of their lifetimes.

When he knocked, the door shook like it might fall off its hinges. No one answered. He knocked again, refusing to believe that the shack was empty. If Keith wasn’t here, Lance didn’t know where else to look. He almost gave up, but a quiet noise from inside made him knock once more, harder this time. “Keith! I know you’re in there! Please, just talk to me!”

The door swung open. The first thing to appear out of the darkness inside was a knife. Keith’s Marmora dagger, unmistakable even with its insignia hidden by wrappings, jutted forward to point at Lance’s throat. “What the hell do you want?” rasped a voice rusty from disuse.

“Whoa, man, put the knife down. It’s Lance!”

“Who?”

This reality sucked.

“Lance! From the Garrison! We were in the same class. Look, I just really need for someone to listen to me about how I’m trapped in an alternate reality and I hope you’re enough of a paranoid nutjob to do it.”

There was a long silence. Then, “You want to come in or something?”

The knife receded, and Lance took the apparent invitation to step inside. Keith clicked on a flickering overhead light, and Lance got his first real look at him. While Hunk and Pidge had looked mostly like themselves, Keith looked rough. His faded, sand-blown jacket hung on a gaunt frame. His hair was long and the ends were uneven, as if he had been cutting it himself. His cheeks were sunken. Only his eyes looked the same, and even they darted around the room nervously when they weren’t staring Lance down.

Lance remembered what the inside of the shack had looked like the last time he saw it – papered with a huge map surrounded by handwritten notes, printouts with Galaxy Garrison letterhead, newspaper clippings, and more all overlapping each other and stuck together with tape and push pins. This version was even more cluttered with layers on layers of notes and papers, the map almost completely obscured by the extra information tacked and scribbled over the top of it. In the confused jumble, Lance picked out the headline “Pilot Error” at least five times.

There was a couch, but Keith perched on the edge of the table instead and watched Lance like a raptor about to dive. “Alternate reality,” he prompted.

”Okay,” said Lance, his head spinning as he tried to sum up the last couple of unbelievable years. “There’s an intergalactic war going on, and we’re supposed to be on the front lines. We got there by accident last time, but this reality is so different… I don’t know how to get all of us together! You gotta help me!”

Keith listened with a tired, pinched expression. “All of us?” he asked dubiously.

“Yeah,” Lance stammered. “It has to be all five. You, me, Hunk, Pidge, and Shiro.”

Keith’s eyes flew wide. “Shiro?” he said breathlessly. “But… he’s not here.”

“He comes back!” Lance said, and saw all the air leave Keith’s body. “In my reality, he came back. You waited for him. No one believed you, but you kept watching the sky. And then, one year after he disappeared, there he was! Now, how long has it been so far in this reality?”

“Three years.”

“Oh,” said Lance as Keith’s posture hardened back into a bitter shell. “Aw, rats.”

Keith sat, staring at the floor in silence as Lance scanned the walls. Some of the papers pinned up there were yellowing and peeling in the dry desert air, but others were crisp and new. Keith hadn’t given up. He just needed the team to give him that last push toward the Blue Lion and Arus.

Lance pointed out the window, at the sky. “Our destiny is out there,” he told Keith. “I can show you how to get there. But you have to lead us, the way my Keith did.”

Keith’s body shook a little, and Lance had to look twice to see that he was silently, humorlessly laughing. “Me? Lead?” he said. “You must not know me.”

He’d tried. But Keith was leaning his elbows on his knees, his head bowed so that Lance couldn’t see his face. He didn’t want to talk anymore, didn’t want to be convinced. Maybe he was too different in this reality, or maybe he’d spent too long alone. Maybe it just wasn’t time yet for him and for the other paladins of this place.

Lance couldn’t wait for him. He had to get back to his own fight, his own reality. To Allura. He moved for the door.

He was about to close it behind him when Keith’s thin voice murmured brokenly, “When you get back…” Lance paused in the doorway to listen. “When you get back. To your reality. Tell your Keith. Tell him how lucky he is.”

It was a lonely ride through the nighttime desert to the outcropping where the Blue Lion’s cave was hidden. Even after all this time, Lance remembered how to get there. In the dark, he clambered his bumpy way down the tumbled rocks and treacherous inclines until he reached the cave’s entrance, where even the light of the stars couldn’t help guide him. He reached out a hand to steady himself against the wall, and the wall answered his touch by glowing with a pale light. But unlike the last time he experienced this, the light was not blue. It was a deep, vital red.

Lance was prepared when the floor opened up beneath him, and for the slide into the cavern below. His lion, the Red Lion, was waiting for him down there, its force field falling at his approach. But there was another distortion surrounding it. Not the neat hexagons of its protective bubble, but an oily, shifting sheen in the air clinging to its surface. It made Lance dizzy to look at it. Even the rocks of the cave seemed to warp where they sat too close to the lion’s form.

The portal between realities. It was all around the Red Lion. It _was_ the Red Lion.

The lion lowered its head and opened its mouth. Lance stepped inside.

And then, without turning around, he was stepping back out again. Instead of the dark cave, he found himself in a realm of white. Motes of light floated around him and above him, studded against the sky like stars and reflected in the glassy pane he stood on.

Under that glass he could see the indistinct forms of the other four lions and, looming over them, the IGF Atlas. They were motionless and unreachable. The Red Lion was the only one above the surface.

Lance was alone.


	2. Pidge

Lotor was a miracle.

His downy soft hair. His chubby toddler cheeks. His impossibly big, blue eyes. The way his strong little arms pawed through a starmap as easily as they held a training sword aloft. The way his legs, already long for his body, kicked and stomped when she tickled him. His laughter.

She remembered him like this, from her own reality. But that Lotor had been raised by servants, and her glimpses of him had been few, far between, and quickly forgotten. She had not known, then, to cherish the sight of him. And even then, even so young, he had already begun to internalize the toxic violence and power games of his father’s Empire. He had learned quickly not to ask questions, not to give anything away, and not to miss an opportunity to take something for himself.

This miraculous Lotor was so inquisitive by comparison, so kind, so gentle. He devoured books and holorecords far too advanced for his age, and asked questions constantly and without fear. He ran and played. He sought and offered affection with no self-consciousness.

He was a miracle, but everyone in this reality took him for granted. Of course they loved him and doted on him, his father especially. But Honerva was the only one who knew how easily this miracle could be shattered. Only she could protect him.

At least for now, there seemed to be nothing to protect him from. Life in the palace was busy, but peaceful. Honerva soaked up the joy of the life she’d missed out on.

Today, she took joy in watching her child recount his lessons to her. His memory was flawless, and his hunger for knowledge insatiable. On top of that, he added his playfulness and childlike wonder to everything he learned. As he recited the Galra history, he leaped and climbed and posed on the furniture to punctuate every proclamation, a stick held in his hand like a sword.

“In the war to annihilate the opposing tribes,” he intoned, over-pronouncing the big words which were not yet comfortable in his little mouth, “the Galra formed a phalanx of their bravest and made a spear-like attack to the heart of their foes! The killing thrust! Vrepit sa!”

The stick was stabbed through the air into the imaginary heart of the enemy, its wielder’s delicate face screwed up in concentration. Honerva applauded the performance wildly. Lotor’s scowl relaxed into a smile.

“Very good!” she said, picking him up off the table he had made into his stage and setting him back on the floor. She straightened his outfit and smoothed his hair out of his face. “Now, your father is waiting for you down in the training yard. Run along. Don’t be late.”

He clung to her. “Will you come, too?”

“I’ll be right behind you, my love.”

He scampered out the door and down the hallway. As soon as he was gone, Honerva activated the holorecord machine in her room. She had little time to herself, so she had to steal moments like this to research the reality she had landed in. She had to know every difference from her own so she could anticipate every possible threat.

So far, she had found no reference in any history to the rift on Daibazaal, nor to the lions of Voltron. The Honerva of this world had met Zarkon while accompanying her friend King Alfor on a diplomatic mission. She had several research projects in progress on Daibazaal, but none into the nature of quintessence. It would seem that in this reality, the comet had never arrived at all.

No comet. No rift. No quintessence. No Voltron.

Just her miraculous son and a lifetime of peace spread out before him.

She minimized the display with a sweep of her hand. Feeling as light as a feather, she left her room and strode the hallways of the royal palace, following after her child.

* * *

[](https://twitter.com/wallmakerrelict/status/1212431919901577216?s=20)

There was a screwdriver in Pidge’s hand.

A moment ago, she’d been accelerating through the portal between realities and she’d held the controls to the Green Lion. Now she was standing still, and holding a screwdriver. She turned it over in her hand. The plastic of the handle was scored and indented from rough use. The metal shaft was cold. If this was a trick or a hallucination, it was a convincing one.

She was standing in front of a robotic arm as large as she was. Half-assembled. Open panels, exposed wiring. Components covered the workbench beside her. Scrap littered the floor. A workshop. She thought the room was oddly proportioned, until she looked again and realized her mistake. The room was fine; she was just taller.

“Earth to Katie!” said a voice from behind her. “You need me to reboot you, sis?”

Pidge turned. Matt was there, pawing through the rest of her toolkit. He was wearing a Garrison uniform - not the orange of a cadet, but the gray and stripes of an officer. Most notably, his hair was clipped short and on his upper lip was a patch of sparse fuzz that tapered around his mouth into a goatee.

Pidge dropped the screwdriver. “Oh my God!” she shouted. “I’m in a different reality!”

She gleaned the story from clues in her surroundings, and from Matt’s startled, stammered answers to her rapid-fire questions. She was twenty-three years old. She’d gotten into the Galaxy Garrison using her own name. She’d never been to space, but her innovations had pushed the Garrison’s exploration farther than they’d ever thought possible. The engineering school had recognized her prodigious talent and given her free rein, making her the youngest person ever to lead a research and development division.

The workshop was full of half-built projects: a wheeled rover, an exosuit with a similar cloaking technology to the one she’d once added to her Green Lion, the wire skeleton form of what looked like a small android, and many more. There was also the mobile arm she’d been working on when she arrived - it looked like the type to be mounted on the outside of a ship and remote-controlled. She glimpsed herself in the reflective chrome of its plating. Sure enough, though her face was streaked with black grease and partially hidden by a pair of goggles propped up on her forehead, she recognized an older version of herself. A version who had everything she’d ever dreamed of before she lost her family to the Kerberos mission.

She tore the plating off, tossed it aside, and started borrowing the electronics from inside the arm.

“You just spend the last month building that!” Matt sputtered.

Pidge detached a fiber-optic cable and added it to her armload of components. “I need to start scanning for instabilities in space-time,” she said. “This reality could be about to collapse.”

“You’re really serious about this alternate reality stuff…” Matt peered at her as she worked. She didn’t have time to explain everything to him. But maybe she could give this world a push in the right direction.

She pointed with her handful of wires at a boxy structure attached to a receiving dish in the corner. “Is that a long-range scanner? Tune it to pick up transmissions around Kerberos.”

“The moon of Pluto?” Matt sounded incredulous, but he grabbed the scanner and started fiddling with it. “Why there? No one has ever been out that far. The farthest a manned mission has ever gone is when Keith flew me and dad to Thebe last year.”

That made Pidge look away from her own work for a second. “Keith’s flying space missions?”

“Of course he is. He’s the best pilot the Garrison’s got.”

“Other than Shiro, you mean.”

“Shiro just teaches now. His last mission was my first one. We went to Ceres to get ice core samples.”

Pidge wanted to ask more, itching to resolve the discrepancies in their timelines, but just then Matt’s tinkering produced a blast of static from the scanner. Matt almost turned it off to stop the noise, but Pidge batted his hands away. She fine-tuned the inputs until the scratchy signal mellowed to a soft white noise with occasional bursts of what could barely be recognized as voices. “…Voltron…” they said. “… Voltron.”

Matt leaned close to the scanner, eyes narrowed and mouth agape. Pidge opened the back panel of the scanner and tore out a chunk of its inner workings. The signal stopped. “What the hell?” Matt protested. “I was trying to listen to that! What was it?”

Pidge started replacing the wires she’d removed with her own modifications. Instead of picking up voice transmissions, she’d soon be able to scan for rift technology. To Matt, she said, “Aliens. I probably shouldn’t tell you too much, since I don’t know how different this reality is from mine, but where I come from they eventually attacked Earth. It sounds like Voltron exists here. You should definitely start looking for it.”

“How do I do that?”

“Like I said, I don’t know if it’s the same here. And I’m not sticking around long enough to figure it out for you.” Then, after a pause, she added, “Start with Lance.”

“That pilot who thinks he’s Keith’s rival?”

Pidge laughed. “I guess this reality isn’t so different from mine.”

“Why did you expect it to be?”

“Well, the first thing I saw when I got here was you with a beard. I was totally ready for this to be the reality where everyone is an evil clone of themselves.”

So far, Matt had seemed to be dazedly following along with Pidge’s manic energy. Now, for the first time, she saw her brother’s smile nervously appear. “But in this universe, it’s always the guy who _doesn’t_ have the beard who’s the evil version!”

“Really?”

“No,” Matt admitted. “I just think it looks good on me.”

“Who told you that?” Pidge said with a snort.

“You did.”

Pidge didn’t try very hard to keep a straight face as she said, “Okay.”

“What?”

“The me from this reality is a liar.”

Matt smirked and said, “Don’t talk about my sister like that.” He watched her work for a while before speaking again, but when he did his voice was more serious and thoughtful. “If you’re Katie from a different reality, where’s the Katie from this reality?”

“I think I hijacked her body. Presumably the two of us are existing in a quantum entangled state, with my memories currently asserting dominance. When I leave, she should revert back to her normal self.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course, just look at the peer-reviewed and double-blind controlled studies where NO I’M NOT SURE, THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE!”

Matt threw his hands up. “Sorry for deferring to you, who has a non-zero level of experience with interdimensional travel, versus me who still doesn’t fully believe this is happening!”

Pidge let him pout. She finished her adjustments and hooked the scanner up to her laptop. Readouts began to rain down her display. It wasn’t good. There was definitely a rift in realities nearby, likely the same one she’d come through, and it wasn’t just a single portal like the one formed by the trans-reality comet. This rift was the endpoint of a tunnel boring through dozens of realities on its way here. The damage caused in its wake was catastrophic. Pidge could only perceive it as distortion in her readings, but she knew it meant that every reality she’d passed through was in the process of collapsing.

Surprisingly, there was no such distortion coming from this reality. It appeared to be stable, at least for now. But why? Haggar’s portal had punched a hole in it just the same as the rest. To understand how her arrival had affected this reality, she’d need to find her entrance point.

Her lion. She’d come here in the Green Lion. She’d been zapped into her counterpart’s body, but her lion must still be wherever they’d first arrived. Find the lion, find the rift.

That was easy. She and Hunk had done it years ago, back when they’d first found the Blue Lion. Once more, she cannibalized the scanner for parts and started building.

Matt watched her, still looking dazed. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you work this fast.”

“The version of me that you know has never had to work in the middle of a war zone with the lives of everyone she cares about riding on her,” Pidge answered. She had long ago memorized the properties of the unique elements that made up Voltron. It took her no time to whip up a portable detector, and it immediately started pinging a slow, steady signal. Her lion wasn’t too far off.

She left the workshop and scampered down the hallways of the Galaxy Garrison, chasing the signal. Matt ran after her.

The windows looked out onto the desert at dusk. Some security personnel were still on the perimeter, but the students had gone back to their dormitories and even the faculty were scarce. The signal led them down corridors, into the little maze of hallways surrounding the cadet classrooms, up two flights of stairs, and to a metal access door. Pidge knew it well. She’d once used this door frequently to get onto the roof. Up there was the spot where she’d first captured the Galra transmissions that changed her life forever. Back then, she’d had a stolen key. Now she jiggled the locked handle uselessly.

“I think I saw some compressed air canisters back in the workshop,” she muttered. “Maybe I can rig one up to blast out the lock…”

“Geez, Katie!” Matt interrupted her. “Shiro has a master key. Come on, his office is right around the corner.”

Pidge followed Matt around a couple of turns and up to a door with the name plaque “T. Shirogane.” Matt knocked twice, then opened the office door without waiting for an answer.

Both Keith and Shiro looked up guiltily as the Holts entered. Keith was sitting on Shiro’s desk, his short hair smashed flat as if it had recently been under a helmet and his broad shoulders filling out a stylish leather jacket. His legs dangled over the edge, one foot hooked around a metal rod leaning against the desk. (Pidge wasn’t sure why the object caught her eye. She couldn’t quite place it - too long and thick to be a baton, but the wrong material and finish for a weapon.)

At the sound of the opening door, Keith snatched a startled hand away from Shiro’s face and jammed it into his pocket. His body was tense and his eyes wide, but he relaxed when he looked past Matt and saw Pidge peeking in at him. “Oh,” he sighed with a relieved smile. “Hi, Kate.”

Shiro stared at Matt over the tops of his reading glasses. He seemed older and, Pidge looked twice to confirm, smaller. He wasn’t nearly as muscular as Pidge was used to seeing him, and there was something about the way he was sitting that made him look even more diminished. His normally perfect posture was broken down and lopsided. It didn’t make sense. This reality was only a few years ahead of hers, so Shiro shouldn’t have been much older than thirty. But despite his full head of black hair and both his arms intact, his youthful energy was gone.

She looked again at the metal rod that Keith was now nervously kicking back and forth. She could see now that it had a curved handle at the top - a cane. And Pidge belatedly remembered that in her reality, Shiro had once been sick.

“We need to get on the roof,” said Matt, forgoing introductions and ignoring Keith’s incriminating presence.

“Why?” said Shiro.

Matt jerked his thumb back at Pidge. “You want her to give you the whole story? I hope you don’t have plans.”

Shiro’s eyes flicked to Keith, and he quickly said, “On second thought, knock yourselves out.” He retrieved a ring of keys from a drawer in his desk and raised his arm to throw them. His hand hadn’t even risen above his shoulder when it shook. It was almost imperceptible, but it made him stop. He handed the keys to Keith instead, who threw them in a perfect arc across the room and into Matt’s hands.

“Thanks, man!” said Matt as he backed out of the office. “I’ll bring them right back!”

“Please don’t,” said Keith as he hopped off the desk and locked the door behind them.

Pidge was quiet as they made their way back to the access door. Most people hadn’t known about Shiro’s disease back in her reality. His symptoms had been well controlled before Kerberos, but electro-stimulators could only treat the early stages. By twenty-six or twenty-seven, he wouldn’t have been able to maintain the conditioning necessary to be a pilot. By thirty, his symptoms would have become obvious. In another few years…

“How long have Keith and Shiro been together in this reality?” she asked.

Matt was rifling through the key ring. “Longer than anyone thinks,” he chuckled. “They’re pretty cagey about it, even with me. They’ve for sure been an item for the last couple of years, but I’m pretty sure something’s been going on since right after we got back from Ceres.”

“That long?! Are they married?”

“Nah. They say it’s not important to them. But I think Shiro thinks not being married will make it easier on Keith when… you know.”

A lump rose in Pidge’s throat. “It won’t,” she murmured.

Matt found the key and opened the door, and Pidge was forced to push her worries about this reality’s Shiro aside. Her sensor started pinging wildly as they ascended a short set of stairs onto the twilight-lit rooftop. It looked just as she remembered it from back when she used to sneak up here to listen for alien chatter in private. She followed her sensor this way and that, trying to figure out where her lion had gone.

The pings came so fast that they resolved to a continuous tone. Pidge turned off the sensor and reached out her hand. In the empty air, it touched something cool and smooth. Pidge’s cloaking technology deactivated with a shimmer, and the Green Lion materialized in front of her.

“Hey, girl,” said Pidge.

“HOLY-“ Matt screamed as he jumped back.

The lion knelt to greet Pidge and opened its mouth. Instead of going inside right away, Pidge did a quick lap around the lion to inspect the tear in reality that shimmered around it. This was the endpoint of the tunnel of destruction she’d slid through to get here. The Green Lion sat like a cork in a bottle, stopping up the rift. That was why this reality had stayed stable while all the ones behind it fell apart.

Matt seemed to have recovered from his shock and was peering at the rift around the lion.

“Don’t touch it,” Pidge advised.

Matt looked offended. “Oh no, really? Do you think this is the reality where I’m stupid?”

Pidge snorted as she tried and failed to hold in a laugh. Matt rolled his eyes.

“Katie,” he said, more seriously this time. He waited until his hard stare made her stop laughing. “I don’t know what kind of energy your scanner was picking up before, but I know enough to recognize an unstable system when I see one. If you take this thing and leave, what will happen to this reality?”

Pidge blew out a long, slow breath. “Impossible to know,” she said. “But most likely, it’ll become vulnerable to the damage from the rift. This whole reality could cease to exist.”

Matt held up a finger. “I have a point of order. I like existing.”

“It’ll be okay. We have a plan to repair the damage. I just need to get back to my friends.”

“How sure are you that this plan will work?”

“A few years ago I would have given you the odds, and they would have been low,” Pidge admitted. “But since then, I’ve been in so many situations where everything looked hopeless. Every time, I figured it out. Or someone else on the team did, or we all did it together. We’ve done the impossible, over and over. As long as I have them, I’m not worried.”

Matt beckoned her over with a smile. Pidge threw her arms around his midsection and squeezed. He hugged her back. “Hey,” he said as he let her go. “If I find Voltron, do I get a cool giant robot shaped like an animal, too?”

As Pidge ran into her lion’s mouth, she called over her shoulder, “Maybe in this reality!”

Then Matt was gone, and a bright white light made her turn to face ahead. She walked into it until the shadows faded out and she emerged in an ocean of stars. Her lion was behind her. In front of her stood Lance, a point of blue lost in a field of white.

“Pidge!” he shouted as she stepped down from her lion. “Boy, am I glad to see you! Help me wake up the others.”

He gestured to the remaining lions and Atlas, still locked below them as if under ice. She could see them, but she couldn’t reach them. They were just reflections across space and time. This was a crossroads, the prism where their six beams of light converged.

The space between realities.

“They’re each in a different reality, Lance,” she said. “We can’t get to them without tearing more holes in the fabric of space-time.”

“Then what do we do?”

“We have to wait for them to find a way out on their own.”

Lance knelt and pressed his hand against the unyielding ground separating them from their friends. His eyes locked with the dull and lightless eyes of the Blue Lion. “Come on,” Pidge barely heard him say.

“Come on…”


	3. Hunk

Honerva woke gasping.

The nightmare had been powerful enough to jar her out of a deep sleep but, for all its horror, it disappeared upon waking like a wisp of smoke. Only the effect on her body remained; even now her blood raced and her chest pounded despite her attempts to calm herself. Honerva had always had trouble remembering her dreams until being reborn in the quintessence field, after which even reality sometimes seemed to shift, swirl, and vanish. Her nightmares had become indistinguishable from her past. What had the last ten thousand years been but a bad dream?

The room was dark. Beside her she could just make out the silhouette of her husband, sleeping heedless of Honerva’s distress. For all his warlike culture, he was a gentle giant by nature. Long ago, she’d looked to him for protection. Now she held her breath until she finally saw the moonlit outline of his chest rise and fall. This peace she lived in was so fragile. So was he. She was a fool to have ever believed he could hold back the coming storm.

Carefully, so as not to wake him, she slipped out of bed and left their chambers. Daibazaal was warm at this time of year, even at night, and she didn’t bother to put on more than a light dressing gown. The only cold she felt was from the stone floor on her bare feet as she wound her way through the palace corridors.

At the top of a set of staircases she found a small landing platform. The ship parked there was a delicate little pleasure craft designed for skimming over the city and surrounding landscape. It was intended for short range flights, but with only one passenger it would get her where she needed to go. The engine cycled on with a low hum. She steered it down off the platform and out of the city.

In her reality, the comet had struck Daibazaal in the middle of a sparsely inhabited rocky plain. By the time she’d arrived from Altea, the crater had cooled and research stations had sprung up around its perimeter. Now, as she left the city lights behind, she saw the landscape as never before: barren and pristine, with a touch of harshness typical of the planet due to its orange-tinged rock in pointy, windswept formations.

She’d thought it would be difficult to find the spot where her lab would have been, on the edge of the non-existent crater. But as she neared the spot, she saw that she would have no trouble pinpointing it with terrible accuracy.

A humanoid shape of incredible size rose from the plain like a monolith. It was the ship Honerva had arrived in – the fusion of her own ship with Sincline. As she descended to land at its feet, she saw the way reality warped around it like heat waves making mirages in the air.

The Sincline fusion stood as a monument to what she’d done. The cost of this peace was a hole in the world leading to a nothingness that would swallow everything if it could. It had already swallowed countless other realities - she’d damned them with her touch before leaving them behind. She’d tried not to think of it, because it should have been unthinkable. To regain her innocence, she’d committed a crime so far beyond imagination that the very concept of justice paled and shrank away.

But she’d known the price when she’d paid it. She couldn’t take it back now, nor would she ever have tried. Her son was all the more precious for the destruction she’d wrought to put him back in her arms. If she felt any remorse, she would pour it back into her love for him.

Her little ship barely made a sound as it fluttered back into the city, and when she returned to her bed Zarkon was still asleep.

* * *

[ ](https://twitter.com/wallmakerrelict/status/1215034720817311745?s=20)

  
As Hunk passed through the portal, an intense flash of white light obliterated his vision. It burned his retinas even through his screwed-shut eyes. The roar of Voltron’s engines faded out and the air grew warm around him, but the light stayed strong and bright.

The back of a hand whapped his upper arm. “Stop staring at the sun. You’ll wreck your eyesight.”

Startled, Hunk looked down and opened his eyes. He was standing on a sidewalk opposite a vacant storefront. The sun was high and the day was bright, but the blinding flash of the portal was gone. So was his lion. So were his friends. He blinked until the spots faded from his vision.

His father was beside him, shaking his head. “You’ve been working toward this for years. I can’t believe you’re daydreaming now that you’re standing in front of it.”

“Sorry, dad,” Hunk mumbled. When they’d finally been reunited after the war for Earth, Hunk’s father had borne four extra years of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and a thin scar running along his jawline, courtesy of Sendak’s work camp. The man in front of him had neither. This was a younger version of his father. A version, he realized with a twisting of his stomach, from a different reality.

His father pointed through the dusty front window. “We’ll have to knock out that wall, there, and the whole back room needs to be finished. But you could fit ovens over there, and if we block off that section it becomes the kitchen.”

They’d played this game before. When Hunk was young, whenever they’d passed a run-down, vacant, or for-sale building, he and his parents had peered through the windows at the bones of the place and made it into a restaurant in their minds. Hunk’s restaurant. The one he’d always said he’d open, before the Galaxy Garrison had offered him a scholarship and an opportunity his parents wouldn’t let him refuse.

Hunk smiled wistfully at the long-gone dream. This may not be his reality, but he saw no harm in playing along for now. He raised his own finger to point. “Put some shelves in, and that corner would make a good bar.”

“Now you’re talking!” his father laughed, clapping him on the back. “I’m proud of you, Hunk. You know what you want, and you’re working to make it happen. All those summers working in my shop, all your saving, everything you’ve sacrificed. It’ll all come together for you soon.”

“Well…” Hunk laughed. “Maybe not _soon_.” He remembered how much money he’d made working in the machine shop. Even if he’d stayed there, saving every penny instead of enrolling at the Garrison, a down payment on a restaurant was a long way off.

“That’s what I brought you here to tell you. I talked to your uncle and auntie. They want to go in on the restaurant with you. She’d keep the books, he’d take care of the front of house. All you’d have to worry about is the food. It’ll still take a while for all the money to come together, but this way you don’t have to go it alone.”

“I- I can’t rope them into this!” Hunk said, waving his hands. “What if it doesn’t work out?”

“You’ll make it work! Hunk, everyone in town knows about your cooking. You’re special. Once this restaurant takes off, they’ll want to put you on TV! Book deals! Fame and fortune!” He was kidding, but only barely.

“We might be getting a little ahead of ourselves,” said Hunk.

When next his father spoke, he was dead serious. “It will work. Other people will soon see what your family has always known: you have a gift.”

“But food’s not all I can do,” said Hunk. “I’m good at building stuff. Isn’t that less of a risk than opening a restaurant?”

His father waved the suggestion away with a flap of his hand. “You _had_ to get good at building stuff to help me in the shop,” he said. “But you don’t want to be breaking your back in there when you’re my age. I want you to have an opportunity to do something more.”

“I wouldn’t have to keep working in the shop. I could be an engineer. Somewhere like the Galaxy Garrison…”

Concern and confusion wrinkled his father’s eyes. “The Garrison? Hunk, we went over this back when you took that aptitude test. I thought you didn’t want to go.”

Hunk remembered. He _hadn’t_ wanted to go. He’d begged to stay at home. “I was scared,” he admitted. And then he echoed what his father had told him in his own reality. “But sometimes the best things in life come from doing something important even though it scares you.”

His father nodded knowingly. “And now you’re scared about opening the restaurant, right?”

“I…” That wasn’t what Hunk had meant, but it was pointless to argue. To this version of his father, the Garrison was a distant possibility, long since passed by. How could Hunk explain that the skills he’d learned in the shop had turned him into one of the greatest engineers in the war for the fate of the universe? How could he explain that the bravery and determination he’d taken from his family had held his heart steady as the Yellow Paladin of Voltron? That with that heart, he had held countless others steady, too?

He sighed and said, “Yeah, I guess that’s it.”

“Bravery comes in many forms,” his father told him. “It’s okay to pick your battles. You didn’t want to go to the Garrison. And now, you never have to.”

Hunk tried to enjoy the rest of the day. He’d missed his family and his hometown since leaving Earth for a second time, and though this was a strange copy it was close enough for comfort. Besides, he didn’t have the first clue how to get back to Voltron, so there wasn’t much he could do other than continue to play along. So he hugged his mother and let her strong embrace warm him before tying on an apron and setting to work helping her with dinner. His youngest cousin hung on his ankle, his body dragging across the kitchen floor as Hunk shuffled back and forth. His sister did her homework at the table and offered Hunk occasional advice on his cooking, though they both knew she couldn’t make palusami as good as his. The rest of the family bustled in and out of the kitchen, stealing pinches of rice and tasting out of every container until Hunk’s mother chased them off with the whip-end of a dishtowel.

It wasn’t until they were sitting down to eat that Hunk happened to glance at the wall calendar, marked all over in multicolored ink. The stripe of a thick black pen cut through the scribbles on each passed day, leaving only the future open and readable. Today was not yet exed out. Hunk recognized the date. He double checked it in his head. Right year, right month, right day. The last day he’d spent on Earth before joining Voltron.

He barely tasted the rest of the meal. The clock on the kitchen wall ticked closer to lights-out time for the Garrison cadets. He should be in the dorm hallways right now, arguing with Lance about whether it was a bad idea to sneak out after curfew. Pidge would be heading up to the roof, soon, wearing a backpack loaded with homemade equipment. It was happening right now. It was passing him by.

“I gotta go!” Hunk shouted, interrupting at least three conversations that were happening across the busy table. He stood up so quickly that he bashed his knee against the table leg, and hopped painfully as he tried to think of an excuse. “I, uh… I’m, um… I’m gonna throw up!” And he dashed away before he had time to register his family’s cries of concern.

He ran out through the garage and outside. Next door, his father’s machine shop was closed for the day, but they never locked the side entrance. Hunk let himself in, hoping that iif anyone was worried enough to look for him they’d assume he’d run out to find some bushes to barf in. No one was likely to look in here.

Though it had been years, he remembered the organized chaos of the shop like he’d been in it yesterday. He rifled through the unlabeled drawers, finding the things he needed on the first or second try every time, and soon he had an armful of tools. The scraps of past projects lying around made it easy to scavenge a headset and a receiving dish, among other parts and pieces. These were cruder materials than Hunk was used to working with, but it didn’t take him long to bang them together into a makeshift two-way radio.

He’d seen Pidge’s setup back on the night he and Lance had found her on the roof. He’d glanced at the notes in her diary, too, where she’d kept a list of her most promising frequencies. Hunk tuned in to one, and pulled on the headset.

“Hello?” he said into the microphone.

There was no answer. He tuned up and down, hailing each of Pidge’s favorite frequencies and their adjacent channels. He kept coming up with nothing, or if he got a response it was just another local radio operator annoyed at an unlicensed kid spamming the airwaves. Finally, he tuned back to the original frequency and tried again. “Pidge? Come on, you’ve got to be there.”

Silence. Then a response crackled through the static and into his headphones. “Did someone just say my name?”

“Aw, Pidge, am I glad to hear your voice!”

The sound of shuffling equipment, clacking keys, and electronic beeping came through in the background, and Hunk thought she must be trying to triangulate him. She said, “Is this some Garrison cadet playing a prank? Stop jamming up my signal. I’m busy.”

“No, no, I’m not at the Garrison. My name’s Hunk, and I’m a couple of hours down the coast from you.”

“What do you want?”

Hunk took a deep breath. It was a big risk, since he didn’t know how different this reality was from his own or how the knowledge would affect the future. But he couldn’t think of any other way to get Pidge to listen to him. He said, “You’re enrolled at the Garrison as Pidge Gunderson, but your real name is Katie Holt. Everyone says your family died on Kerberos, but they didn’t. They were abducted by aliens. Right now you’re on the roof of the south training complex with a scanner array that you built. For months you’ve been picking up deep space transmissions that sound like ‘Voltron,’ and tonight they’re going crazier than you’ve ever heard them, right?”

This time there was a long silence on the other end of the line. Then Pidge said in a different tone, “Who did you say you are again?”

“Look, you don’t know me, but you’re the only person I can think of who might be able to help me.”

“Before we talk about helping you, it sounds like you can help us! What do you know about the Kerberos mission? And what is Voltron?”

“Wha… oh, geez… okay…” Hunk could almost feel the Pidge from his own reality standing behind him, leaning over his shoulder and yelling at him not to use his foreknowledge to wreck the timeline. “Allura will tell you about Voltron when you meet her, and Shiro can tell you about what happened at Kerberos.”

“Who the hell is Shiro?” said Pidge.

And then another voice spoke, so unexpected that it made Hunk jump. “Shirogane. You know, the guy who was originally supposed to pilot the Kerberos mission.” Hunk knew that voice. It was Lance.

“Oh, Lance is already there?” Hunk said. That didn’t seem right. It was too early in the evening for anyone but Pidge to be on the roof.

“Of course he is,” said Pidge. “We’ve been working together since I got to the Garrison.”

“They wanted Shiro for Kerberos,” said Lance, his voice muffled as if he were talking to Pidge instead of into the microphone. “But from what I heard, he stepped down because he got sick. He’s not a pilot anymore. I think he’s getting married soon.”

Hunk cut in. “If Shiro stepped down, who piloted the Kerberos mission?”

“My sister, Veronica.”

Hunk snatched the headphones off his ears. Through them, he could hear Pidge and Lance’s tinny voices buzzing distantly, but he couldn’t make out any words. This was wrong. Hunk wasn’t the only thing different about this reality. Everything might be different, even things he hadn’t thought of yet. He had no business speaking to the Pidge and Lance of this reality. His advice couldn’t help them. He could only damage the natural flow of this timeline.

This was the reality where he stayed home, accepted his family’s support, and opened a restaurant. Minimal risk. Comfort and happiness. A sense of accomplishment. This was the reality where he didn’t have to be a paladin of Voltron.

So, why was that thought crushing him from the inside?

He could hear his family still chattering away over the dinner table through the open window next door. His cousin shrieked in protest as his father’s voice boomed out some embarrassing joke. His uncle’s high, wheezing laughter cut through the rest of the family’s responses. Closer by, a door creaked open and then clicked closed. His mother called out through the garage side entrance, “Hunk? Sweetie, you out here?”

He loved them. He missed them. His heart ached for that generational peace and unshakable solidarity.

But they didn’t need him. Not like his friends did. Not like Voltron did. Not like the universe did.

And, if he was being selfish, he didn’t need to be a cook in a small town in peacetime. Not like he needed to be a paladin.

He closed his eyes. His heart reached out to his destiny. And in a fraction of a second, with a flash of lighted eyes in the darkness of the void, he knew exactly where the Yellow Lion was.

“Sorry, buddy,” he muttered to himself as he put the headset back on over his ears. “You don’t know it yet, but I’m doing you a favor.”

He could hear his mother wandering closer, still calling for him, so he spoke quickly. “Something is going to happen tonight,” he shout-whispered, trying to keep Pidge and Lance from talking over him while still being quiet enough not to be noticed by his mom. “I’m not exactly sure what, but when it happens, your lives are never going to be the same. I just need you to promise me something. Whatever happens, I have to be a part of it. You can’t leave me behind. I’ll kick and scream and probably throw up, but there is no way I’m missing out on this.”

“How do we find you?” said Pidge.

“Oh, that won’t be a problem.” And with that, Hunk shut the radio down and tossed the headphones aside for good.

He slipped out the back door and hid in some bushes while his mom poked her head into the shop, calling his name. After a few more minutes of searching up and down the block, she seemed to give up. After all, wherever he’d gone, this was a safe town. It might have been strange for him to leave in the middle of a meal, but his parents didn’t have to worry about him getting into trouble. This was the kind of town where everyone knew their neighbors, where people didn’t bother to lock their front doors at night. Where they left their car keys under the sun visor.

As soon as his mother went back inside, Hunk stole his uncle’s truck off the curb and drove toward the freeway.

Hunk’s hometown was two hours from the Garrison academy. He made it there in an hour and a half, flying up the road like he was in the Yellow Lion instead of in a thirty-year-old pickup with a crooked bumper and bald tires. He only slowed down when he neared the first of the Garrison checkpoints, and as soon as he saw its floodlights winking in the distance he turned off the road and bumped his way across the dunes to avoid them.

The desert at night looked the same in every direction. Hunk got lost and had to loop back a couple of times to get his bearings, but when he recognized the rock formations overhead where Keith had long ago made their stomach-turning escape, he knew he was going the right way.

He burst out of the rocks and into a windswept valley. Hunk remembered it dotted with ATVs and quarantine tents, with the wreckage of a Galra pod being carted away. But none of that scene was here now. In its place sat the Yellow Lion. Hunk didn’t think he’d ever seen something more beautiful.

The pickup skidded to a stop in front of Yellow’s paws. Its head was already bowing in greeting, its jaws opening wide. As Hunk jumped out of the truck, alarms started blaring in the direction of the Garrison base and a tiny, fast-moving glint of light appeared in the sky above him.

“Okay, me. Once I’m gone I hope you have enough sense to get out of the way,” Hunk muttered. Then he put a hand over his own heart, not knowing whether this other version of Hunk would remember, but feeling responsible toward him anyway. This Hunk had no idea yet how far he had to go. He had no idea how worth it it would be.

“You got this,” he said.

Hunk ran into his lion and, just before a flash of white light overtook him, he looked back to see his mirror image standing bemusedly in the sand, waving after him.


	4. Shiro

The ambassador to Marchanda looked familiar.

Honerva had met many familiar people in this reality. By design, it was very similar to the world she’d come from. Alfor and Melenor ruled on Altea. Zarkon was friendly with Blaytz, Trigel, and Gyrgan, though none of them were paladins of Voltron in a world where Voltron didn’t exist. Many of the palace staff were the same Galra she’d known centuries ago. Honerva was doing her best to let go of the memories of her own reality, where all those relationships had ended in betrayal or tragedy. This was a new world and a fresh start.

But this man was different. He wasn’t a simple palace servant - as an ambassador, he was part of the Galra aristocracy, and not someone easily overlooked. Zarkon greeted him warmly when he entered. His name didn’t jog Honerva’s memory, but she studied his face, knowing that she’d met him before and that his presence made her nervous.

“Vorloz, my old friend,” said Zarkon. “It’s been far too long since you returned to Diabazaal.”

Vorloz saluted, then grasped Zarkon’s offered forearm with a smile. “Apologies, emperor. I’ve had duties on Marchanda these last several years that were impossible to neglect.”

“I hear you have a family. A wife from among the locals, even!”

“You of all Galra understand best,” Vorloz said with a chivalrous bow toward Honerva. “You know the right partner when you meet her. Ah, here they are. Allow me to present my wife, Ashki, and my young daughter…”

Vorloz gestured to the door where two figures were just entering. And then Honerva remembered where she’d met him. It had been the same day that her young son had met the first of his generals.

A little slip of a creature paced slowly into the room. Her skin was red, with markings ranging from dark rust to almost pink. Her shape was reptilian. A long tail dragged behind her, and her delicate hands bore blunted claws. Her domed head was nearly featureless. No eyes, no ears, barely a nose, and a small, toothless mouth. The Marchandan was so ugly that she barely seemed sentient.

The little girl beside her, by comparison, was livelier. She had the same off-putting, eyeless countenance as her mother, but her Galra features showed through. Her skin was blue and purple instead of sickly red. Instead of a narrow, gummy mouth she had a pointed jaw and visible teeth. Her tail wasn’t long enough to reach the ground, but it was thick and strong and it lashed behind her expressively as she walked. By her build, she would one day be much bigger than her mother.

“Narti.”

Later that evening, Honerva seethed her way through the dinner Zarkon hosted for several of his ambassadors and their families. She’d hoped the Marchandans would not be allowed to attend. After all, in her time, non-noble outsiders and especially half-breeds were relegated to a separate chamber for such events. The only reason Honerva had ever been welcome was because of Zarkon’s influence. But Ashki and her daughter were there at the table, and no one seemed perturbed by their presence. Least of all Zarkon himself, who kept trying to talk to the little girl. The prolonged peacetime of this reality had softened him until he was almost pathetic.

“She can hear you,” Vorloz assured Zarkon when Narti did not respond. “Marchandans communicate by a kind of telepathy that’s difficult to explain. It’s rare for them to make a mental connection with anyone other than their own species.”

“You must count yourself lucky, then,” said Zarkon, looking put out as Narti continued to stare straight ahead, unseeing and unmoving except for the occasional twitch of her tail.

A door opened at the other end of the hall, and Honerva momentarily forgot her resentment at the sight of her son. He waved shyly to her as his Dayak led him into the hall. The Dayak was young and not very bright. Honerva had lost track of how many Dayaks she’d dismissed since she arrived. Obviously, none of the fools who’d tutored Lotor in her original reality would do. But everyone else she’d tried had proved to be deficient in some way. Honerva was almost ready to do away with Dayaks for good and tutor Lotor herself.

She tried to signal the Dayak with her eyes to bring Lotor to her, but instead the idiot seated him beside the Marchandans. As Lotor settled into the seat next to Narti, Honerva finally caught the Dayak’s eye. She quailed under Honerva’s glare. Honerva made a mental note to dismiss her as soon as possible.

Lotor, pleased by the presence of someone his age, began excitedly babbling at Narti. For the first time, the Marchandan girl raised her head and turned it toward the sound of his voice. Honerva hoped Lotor would be put off by her disturbing face and her silence, but he only seemed emboldened, carrying on a one-sided conversation as if the girl were responding to him though she opened her mouth rarely and only to put food into it.

Telepathy. This girl was speaking to her son in a way that Honerva could neither perceive nor control. Who could tell what ideas she was putting in his head?

It was in a different world and in a different body than this, but Honerva had once been able to use her Altean magic and the dark power of quintessence to slip inside minds. Now she reached out with her mind across the table and tried to touch Narti’s thoughts.

She heard nothing. Her current body hadn’t spent centuries steeped in quintessence, and her power was slow to respond to her summons. But she must have accomplished something, because Narti’s little head jerked and spun toward Honerva as if she could see her. Honerva hadn’t thought a face without eyes could look so accusing.

Later that night, when the ambassadors had taken their leave and Lotor had gone to bed, Honerva cornered Zarkon in their room.

“I want the Marchandan woman and her daughter banished from the palace,” she said. “No, from Daibazaal. The girl is a bad influence on Lotor.”

Zarkon’s expression went through a spectrum of changes, from confusion to disbelief until it settled on helplessness. “Honerva,” he protested. “She’s just a child.”

“Don’t patronize me. She is dangerous.”

“Vorloz will not stand for this insult to his family.”

“Then relieve him of his position.” When Zarkon seemed about to respond with outrage, Honerva silenced him with a frosty glare and a finger pointed to his chest. “If you will not do what is necessary to keep Lotor safe, then rest assured I will take matters into my own hands.”

Zarkon looked at her with something like fear in his eyes. Good. If he could not learn to fear the threats that swirled around their son, then let him fear her, instead.

The next night, the ambassadors convened for dinner again. Vorloz, his Marchandan bride, and his half-blood spawn were nowhere to be seen.

* * *

[](https://twitter.com/wallmakerrelict/status/1217631431150563329?s=20)

The first thing Shiro noticed was that he could feel his right arm. It had been years since his body had been fully intact. He’d gotten used to the tingle and ache of a phantom limb, then to the alien haptic feedback of his Galra prosthetic, then once more to the warm buzz of his shoulder attachment and the cerebral push and pull of his remote Altean-designed hand. Having a working arm of flesh and bone was a startling contrast. He clenched his hand, and the pulse in his fingertips was electrifying.

He was so focused on his arm that it took him a second or two to notice that the bridge of IGF Atlas was gone. His hands were not splayed over a control panel, but gripping handlebars. The noise in his ears was not the roar of Atlas’s inner workings, but the high whine of a much smaller engine. His bridge crew was gone. Red rock and yellow sand flashed by him, too fast to perceive.

He was on a hoverbike. The wind in his hair countered the heat of the sun beating down on him as his speedometer climbed into the red.

Shiro slammed on the brakes, and his bike kicked up a cloud of dust and sand as it fishtailed to a stop. When he killed the engine, the only sound was his own startled panting. He recognized his surroundings through the swirling dust around him. He was back on Earth, on one of the gentler desert trails he’d frequented as a cadet. He’d taken Keith here, too, to teach him how to drive the hoverbike before letting him graduate to the more difficult trail with the cliff drop.

Another engine revved in the distance, and Shiro turned to see a second bike coming up behind him. It slowed as it approached. Shiro held up his right hand (still such a strange sensation) to greet who he thought must be Keith.

But as the bike came to a stop, Shiro recognized the driver. Not Keith. Someone else he’d once ridden these trails with.

“Takashi!” Adam called out over the noise of his engine. “What’s wrong? I didn’t think I’d catch you until we got back to the Garrison.”

The desert seemed to spin around them. Shiro’s breath felt tight in his chest as he looked at the face he thought he’d never see again. But this was not his reality. He couldn’t let Adam know what he knew. “Just got going a little too fast,” he said, trying not to sound out of breath.

Adam rolled his eyes fondly. “Be careful. You just returned in triumph from flying a spaceship to Kerberos. It would be really stupid if you died now because you crashed a hoverbike.”

Shiro started his bike back up, and the two of them continued along the trail. As Shiro twisted his left hand to change gears, he felt the pinch of a ring on his finger through his glove.

He knew the trail so well that his body navigated on autopilot while his mind raced. This reality seemed so ordinary and mundane compared to the war zone he’d come from. He didn’t know how he would find the other paladins from here. He didn’t know how he could get back to Atlas. To his shame, some small, insistent part of him didn’t want to. He’d suffered so much in his own reality. It was hard not to envy the man whose body he now wore – whole, with Kerberos successfully behind him, enjoying a leisurely ride with his fiancé. This was a peace he hadn’t known for so many years. A chance he’d never gotten, and that he might never get again.

The sun had passed its zenith by the time they pulled their bikes back onto garrison grounds. Adam entered the gate just ahead of Shiro. He parked, and hopped off his bike as he watched Shiro approach. “Wow, I can’t remember the last time I beat you here. Are you feeling okay? You…”

Shiro didn’t even bother parking his bike properly before leaping off of it and wrapping Adam up in a hug. He’d been too surprised to do it earlier, but now he allowed himself the reunion he’d been denied back in his own reality. It wasn’t as if he’d returned to Earth hoping for a reconciliation; he didn’t love Adam like that anymore. But Adam had been a part of his life for years. There would always be some small corner of Shiro’s history and heart that belonged to him. He hadn’t wanted to reconcile, but he had wanted to see him, to embrace him, to walk into the future with the past light on his mind. Instead, he’d come home to a corpse, and the past would always hang around his neck like a weight.

This wasn’t his Adam. But having him in his arms released that weight, if only for a moment.

“This might be coming out of nowhere,” said Shiro, “but I want to talk about the fight we had before I left for Kerberos.”

Adam let Shiro keep holding him, but pulled back enough to look him in the eyes. “Takashi, we had some, uh, strongly-worded discussions. But I don’t remember us _fighting_. I knew how important Kerberos was to you. I worried about you, but I supported you.”

“Even though I was sick?”

Adam laughed and finally pulled away from Shiro’s embrace to hang up his helmet and lock his bike. “When have you ever been sick a day in your life? I swear, you don’t even catch colds.”

Only then did Shiro look down at his wrist. He wasn’t wearing an electro-stimulator. When he peered even closer, he couldn’t see the little scar from the continuous rate infuser implant they’d given him right after his diagnosis. He must have been out on the trail for an hour or more, but his arm felt strong. Not a single twinge or cramp in that whole time.

Adam was walking ahead toward the base. When he noticed that Shiro wasn’t following him, he called back, “Come on! They wanted to give you a progress report on the IGF project, and we’re almost late.”

IGF. Could it be Atlas? “Okay,” said Shiro, floating after him.

He followed Adam across the yard and around a couple of administration buildings to the largest hangar. There was a massive ship inside - gray, with black and orange accents, the size of a small town. But it was not Atlas as Shiro knew it. It was a different shape. The engines were placed differently, as was the bridge. Its whole design was a little boxier, a little less streamlined. Most notably, there wasn’t a weapon visible anywhere on it.

As Shiro listened to the engineers give their report, he confirmed what he’d already suspected. This was Atlas if it had been designed by humans without any Altean input. Atlas if it was made to explore the stars instead of defend the Earth. Atlas as Shiro had imagined it as a boy – a flying city to carry him boldly into unknown space.

The sun was getting low. When the engineers had gone, Shiro lingered behind. Only a few technicians remained in the hangar, and they didn’t seem to care when Shiro approached the base of the ship. He put his hand on the hull. Once again, he was startled by the sensitive press of flesh instead of the click of metal on metal. Even if this were his Atlas, he wouldn’t be able to interface with it. Not with a human arm and a nervous system untouched by Altean technology.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said Adam, joining Shiro in the shadow of the ship and sliding a hand around his waist.

“Yes,” Shiro murmured, and he wasn’t lying. It was a beautiful ship, a beautiful effort, a beautiful dream. It just wasn’t what he needed right now.

“They expect it to be flightworthy in as few as six months. After training, crew selection, and safety testing, we could be blasting off within a year. This is everything we ever dreamed about when we were cadets. And it’s almost here.”

Shiro was trying to figure out how to respond when Adam kissed him. In spite of himself, his eyes dropped shut and his hand went to Adam’s cheek. Even after all this time, he could sink mindlessly into that kiss like muscle memory. That kiss was a teenage crush, it was comfort, it was shelter in a storm. Once, a long time ago, it had been hope for the future.

But it wasn’t that anymore. It was just the past weighing on him now. So Shiro kissed Adam back, knowing that he was kissing him goodbye.

When they broke apart, Adam was looking at him strangely. “Is something wrong?” In that moment, he saw Adam and himself more clearly than ever before.

They were both bold men. They had to be, to have pursued the careers they chose. But within that boldness, there was room for them to be so different from each other. Shiro chased his dreams ruthlessly, whatever the cost, while Adam prized safety and order. It had worked, right up until Shiro’s illness had revealed the upper limit of Adam’s support. Maybe this was the reality in which they could be happy together – where Shiro was healthy and war never found them. Maybe the ambitions of the Shiro from this reality would never bump up against that limit.

But Shiro wasn’t from this reality. He’d felt his body betray him. He’d been a prisoner, a soldier, and a champion. He’d met his own limits again and again, and broken through them. Now he knew himself the way the Shiro from this reality never would – that he could stare into fear and suffering and still be bold.

He didn’t need the kind of protection Adam could offer him, the kind that stopped at the edge of the fire. He needed someone who would love him even as he walked into that fire. He needed someone who would walk beside him.

“Adam…” said Shiro, almost choking on the words. “I need to talk to Keith.”

Adam wrinkled his face in confusion and said, “Who?”

That night, when Adam was asleep, Shiro opened his computer and began to search. He started with Garrison records, and while he smiled to see Hunk and Lance among the cadets with Katherine Holt on the roll of junior applicants, he found no mention of Keith.

So, Keith had never made it to the Garrison in this reality. Then where was he?

Next, Shiro searched for the high school Keith had been attending when they met. He got lucky: the email with the schedule for his youth outreach presentations was still saved deep in his inbox, with the rosters for each school attached. He found Keith’s school and scanned the list. His name wasn’t there.

He had no better luck with foster records or even with police records (the Keith from his reality had had a couple of misdemeanors on file even before he’d stolen a Galaxy Garrison car). When he ran out of leads to follow on Keith, he searched for his father instead. That search yielded results much more quickly. An archived newspaper article covered the ranch house blaze that had claimed the life of a local firefighter. A short profile of the man followed.

No next of kin. No living parents or grandparents. No living siblings. No spouse.

No children.

Shiro minimized the screen with a wave of his shaking hand. When he’d first learned that the Kerberos mission had been a success, he’d assumed that in this reality the Galra had somehow passed them by. Now his mind spun out other possibilities. Perhaps the Kerberos mission hadn’t encountered any Galra because in this reality, the Galra Empire didn’t exist.

Without a Galra Empire, there would be no Blade of Marmora. No Blade of Marmora, and Krolia would never have had reason to come to Earth. She’d never met Keith’s father. Keith had never been born.

Shiro grabbed his coat and left his and Adam’s apartment. He crossed the campus in the dark, ignoring the night-owl pilots and engineers who tried to greet him and the pair of cadets who waved to him apologetically as they scampered back toward the dorms well past curfew. He dodged the perimeter guards, and the one or two who noticed him didn’t make a fuss. He was Takashi Shirogane. He could go where he pleased.

He sneaked back into the hangar where Atlas loomed, waiting, and entered the ship. The layout was not quite the same as his Atlas, so it took him some time to find the bridge, but when he arrived he found it much the same as he remembered it. The captain’s seat was placed on a raised central platform facing the main viewscreen. Stations for communications, navigation, tactical, and engineering filled out the lower level of the room – empty seats that should have been filled by Veronica, Iverson, and the other Atlas crew that Shiro had grown to trust and rely on.

He stood in his usual spot and gripped the edge of the control panel, unsure what he hoped to accomplish here. This Atlas wasn’t even finished yet, and when it was it would have a traditional power source instead of the Altean crystal that drove his own ship. Just an ordinary spacecraft instead of the transforming mech he was meant to command. But it was his closest link to home, so he splayed his right hand over the controls and whispered to his ship, “Please, please. I can’t stay here. Please take me back.”

A metallic click and a _whoosh_ of compressed air being released made Shiro whip around. The core that held Altas’s power source was rising from the floor behind him. As its interior cleared the lip of the platform, a blue light escaped from its casing. Shining within was the crystal that had once been the Castle of Lions. It shouldn’t have been there. It didn’t belong in this reality. But there it was, casting shimmers and distortions in the air around it. The whole bridge seemed to warp toward it like light bending around a black hole.

Shiro didn’t hesitate. He reached out and touched it.

Light blasted through his arm, making his flesh translucent with its intensity. The distortion wobbled violently, then settled, then disappeared. The light grew brighter and brighter until he couldn’t help but blink.

When he opened his eyes, the light was gone. The crystal twinkled with no more than its usual luster. He was touching it not with a hand of flesh and blood, but with the unyielding metal palm of his prosthetic.

Around him was his bridge. His Atlas. His crew. But they were motionless, frozen in the instant they’d passed through the portal. Iverson’s mouth was left awkwardly open in the middle of some exclamation. Veronica’s face was locked in a grimace, and one of her hands was thrown up in front of her to shield her eyes. Shiro stepped down and touched her shoulder. It was as cold and rigid as a marble statue. Not even the wrinkles in her uniform moved. They hadn’t been connected to Atlas the way Shiro had. Instead of being thrown into different realities, they remained here in stasis.

Shiro left the bridge and rushed through Atlas’s corridors to the exit. The past was behind him now. He opened the door and ran toward his future on feet as light as air.


	5. Keith

“What has gotten into you, Honerva?”

Honerva barely looked up from the datapad in her lap. She was busy setting Lotor’s lessons for tomorrow. When she’d dismissed his final Dayak without a replacement, she hadn’t anticipated how much work it would be to handle his education herself. She’d spent most evenings since then researching and planning, and modifying the standard curriculum. It was time-consuming, but worth it. This way she could control all the information Lotor was exposed to.

She had no patience left for her fool of a husband, so she tried to tune him out as he prattled on, “It was one thing for you to take over his schooling. But now you’ve taken him out of his room and moved him to our wing of the palace.”

“I needed to keep a closer eye on him,” Honerva muttered, still working.

“Fine,” Zarkon huffed. “But that means he’s farther away from his friends. You’ve forbidden him to attend any more state dinners or visit with the children of any visiting dignitaries. You won’t allow him to join us when we go out into the city. Even the servants are frightened to approach him, lest they provoke you. Do you mean to isolate the boy from everyone but the two of us?”

Honerva didn’t bother to answer. The argument bored her, as did Zarkon himself. Though she had been so happy to see him at first, the longer she spent here the more her contempt for him grew. He was not fit to be her husband, let alone emperor. All he could do was squawk at her whenever she did something he didn’t like. But he hadn’t stopped her thus far. He was too weak to exert even what little power he had.

Zarkon went on, “He was meant to spend next phoeb on Altea, furthering his studies. He was looking forward to it. But today, he comes crying to me that the trip has been cancelled. Is this how I am to learn of such decisions?”

“There is nothing he can learn on Altea that he cannot learn from me, here.”

“But he cannot see the beauty of his mother’s home planet from here,” said Zarkon. “He cannot taste its food and delight in its customs. He cannot visit with his dear friend, Princess Allura.”

He might have gone on, but Honerva finally lowered her datapad and rounded on him. He faltered as she snapped, “That girl is no friend of his! She would only steal him away from me!”

“Honerva,” he begged. “This is wrong. Your paranoia will tear this family apart. Please, tell me what is troubling you so we can face it together.”

She stood, her face hardened by the strength of her resolve. Zarkon seemed to shrink before her eyes. “The only thing tearing this family apart is your pitiable weakness,” she said. “Lotor belongs to me!”

He gaped at her, repelled by the righteousness of her truth. She waited for him to slink away as he always did. But instead, his wounded eyes stared with a horrified clarity. He set his jaw. Barely above a whisper, he said, “You’re not my wife!”

“Your wife?” Honerva sneered. Power surged in her, called up out of dormancy by her fury. Her vision warped as her eyes flashed yellow. Her skin prickled as quintessence rising to the surface made its color deepen like a bruise. Magic crackled at her fingertips. “Your wife was weak. I am your wife hardened by ten thousand years of fire! I am your wife with knowledge beyond your comprehension. I am your wife who has seen our son twisted body and soul by the war you waged. Your wife could not protect him, but I can! I am the only one who can protect Lotor!”

Still weak, still pitiful, he trembled at the sight of her. But to his credit, he stood up straight as he shouted back in her face, “You are a witch! You will never see Lotor again!”

He moved to block the door.

He couldn’t stand against her. But the fact that he’d tried removed the last of her inhibitions. With an angry scream and a sweep of her hands, she lashed out at him with all the quintessence she could muster. Her lightning pierced him like a bug against the wall and then he was falling, soundless, slack-jawed, to crash in a heap on the floor.

Honerva didn’t wait to see if he would get up before she leaped over him and through the door. She couldn’t stop to think about what she’d done. Lotor was all that mattered. What was a husband, a palace, a planet? As long as she had her son, there was a whole unsullied universe to hide in, and she would gladly burn Daibazaal to the ground as long as she and Lotor could escape the flames.

Lotor was in his room, a set of little Galra-shaped toys arranged on the floor around him and balanced on his crossed legs. He looked up hopefully as Honerva entered, but his face quickly fell when he saw her expression. “Mother?” he said carefully, his voice wavering.

“We’re leaving,” she told him, pulling him upright by one of his wrists. His toys clattered to the ground.

He dragged his feet, stumbling and tripping along after her. “Where are we going?” he asked. He tried to grab his datapad as they passed by his desk, and then his coat as they approached the door. They were moving too fast. He missed them both.

“Don’t ask questions,” said Honerva. His wrist slipped in her hand, his weight dragging down on her grip. She held him tighter.

“I want my father!” Lotor whimpered as they staggered into the hallway together. It was empty, at least so far. Perhaps they still had time to escape before anyone could discover what she’d done to Zarkon and raise the alarm.

“Your father is of no use to either of us,” Honerva spat. “You’re coming with me. I’m all you’ll ever need.”

She tried to flee down the hallway, but Lotor dug his heels in. He pulled against her grip with all his strength, making his little bones grind under her fingers. “No!” he screamed, loud and shrill enough for everyone in this wing of the palace to take notice. “I don’t want to go!”

A door or two cracked open down the hallway. Cautious faces poked out, unable to ignore a voice in such distress. But they saw Honerva and stopped, torn between their sense of duty and fear of their empress. Only one door swung wide: the door to her own room. Zarkon’s room. That door hit the wall with a crash loud enough to scare the cowardly servants back into their chambers, and Zarkon emerged into the hallway. He staggered as he walked, and grasped the doorframe to keep from falling. With his other hand he clutched at his chest where a wisp of smoke was rising from his charred skin. But he let go of his wound to reach out for his son.

Perhaps the man she had married was not so pitiful after all.

Her grip loosened in that moment of hesitation, and Lotor wrenched his hand free. She could have caught him again, but instead she watched as he sprinted the length of the corridor and clung to his father’s leg. Hiding. Cowering. Seeking protection. From her.

She didn’t wait for Zarkon to call for the guards. She ran. Away from her husband and her son. Away from the perfect life she’d bought with the blood of a million million worlds. It was ruined now, and there was no fixing it.

It had all been for nothing.

* * *

[](https://twitter.com/wallmakerrelict/status/1220201463017869314?s=20)

The view was beautiful from under the tree in front of the desert shack. Dust devils swirled on the brick-red plain, ruffling the sparse tufts of hardy grass that grew out of the cracks in the ground. Rock formations in the distance chopped up the horizon into crags and spires, all of them reflecting the sunlight with a rosy glow. The afternoon sun was relentlessly hot. Only this spot was comfortable, in the shade of the thick leaves of the tree.

Keith dreamed of this place often.

But he was not dreaming now.

“I’m home?” he muttered to himself, and gasped at the sound of his own voice. It was high and creaky. He patted himself down and found his body smaller and skinnier that it had been only moments ago. He ran a distracted hand through hair shorter than he’d worn it in over a decade.

A tire swing bumped his elbow as it twisted lazily in the breeze. Keith caught it and marveled at the familiar texture of old, sun-warmed rubber. The top of the tire was level with his eyes. He’d never seen it from this vantage point. The swing had been taller than him on the day they’d taken him away to the foster home, and by the time he’d returned as an adult it had been gone.

Gone, along with the house. But when he turned, the house was there, dwarfing the shack beside it. There was a figure on the porch half-hidden in shadow, but Keith would have known that silhouette in any reality. “Hey, Keith,” his father called out to him, “c’mon back inside before you get heatstroke.”

The sun scorched his shoulders as he sprinted the short distance between the shade of the tree and the shade of the porch. His father stood under the awning, his arms crossed over his fireman’s vest. He was as Keith remembered him – tall and broad, with strong arms and an inexpressive face. He’d always been a laconic sort of man, guarded with his emotions, though his eyes always crinkled happily when he looked down at Keith. His hair was a little shaggier than Keith remembered it, and the hairline at his temple was pushed back by a shiny burn scar that Keith had never seen before. In his own reality, Keith’s father had never had a chance to grow his hair out that long. He hadn’t lived long enough to earn that scar.

If he noticed Keith’s staring, he didn’t remark on it. He just jerked his thumb at the front door. “In you go.”

Too disoriented to do anything but obey, Keith opened the door. The interior of the house was achingly familiar. The linoleum entryway quickly became discolored carpet, crushed down by decades of use. The living area was messily scattered with chairs and a big sofa – Keith could even see the fluff poking through that one seam in the armrest that kept unraveling no matter how many times it was mended. Around the corner he could just see the edge of the kitchen counter, to his left was the hallway leading to his father’s study, and to his right a staircase bent its way up to the second floor.

A pair of feet covered in worn socks hung over the edge of the sofa. As Keith pushed the door the rest of the way open, those feet swung down to the ground and Krolia sat up, putting a handheld datapad aside.

“Too hot for the swing, huh?” She stood and stretched, looking willowy and cool. Keith was used to seeing her with a serious expression, the hard lines of her muscles accentuated by the Marmora armor that covered her entire body. But now she was wearing only a pair of high-waisted denim shorts and a thin tank top. The violet skin of her arms, legs, and chest glowed in the sunlight streaming through the windows, and her outline was all soft curves.

She looked so happy. Keith had never imagined her as anything other than a soldier, but one glimpse of Krolia in peacetime taught him that this was her natural state, and Krolia the soldier was the armor she wore to survive.

Krolia picked up a smaller datapad, one with a thick rubber case to make it easier for a child to hold, and held it out to Keith. “Let’s get back to your studies. Try to get through the next chapter before dinner, okay? Tell me when you reach the part about relativity – this textbook gets a few things wrong.”

Keith almost took it, but had to clasp his hands instead to keep them from shaking. He didn’t know where he was, or why, or how long he’d be allowed to stay. And he might never have this chance again. “Mom?” he said in his wavery, unfamiliar voice. As his father followed him inside and closed the door behind him, Keith looked between his parents and said, “Can I have a hug? From both of you?”

“Of course, sweetie!” Krolia’s concern about the odd request didn’t stop her from kneeling down and catching Keith up in her arms. He felt, rather than saw, as she jerked her head to beckon his father down to join them.

A second pair of arms encircled him, and he held his breath to keep a straight face. He was good at not crying. He’d had a lot of practice. But that meant tamping down his emotions so that they couldn’t overflow, and he didn’t want to do that right now. He wanted to feel everything in this moment, even the knot twisting his throat, threatening to wring tears out of him.

“Everything okay?” his father said, his deep voice and the whiskers on his cheek tickling Keith’s ear.

Keith managed to make his voice steady when he replied, “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

He hadn’t known his heart could heal and break at the same time.

* * *

Keith half expected to be torn out of this reality as quickly as he’d been dumped into it. With each breath, he waited for this precious moment to end. But it stayed. Krolia sat with him on the couch and watched him read the digital display, occasionally interjecting to clarify, quiz, or rail against the relative primitiveness of humanity’s understanding of physics. His father cooked dinner, laughing at Krolia’s consternation and halfheartedly defending his species.

They ate dinner, the three of them around the little table. The yellow sunbeams coming through the windows tracked across the floor and turned orange, then red.

It stayed until it felt real, until it no longer felt like it could dissolve at any moment, and Keith began to breathe easily. When the sky dimmed and all the dishes were washed and stacked, his parents sent Keith upstairs to his room. And there, lying in darkness, safe and warm in his childhood bed, Keith’s heart skipped a beat. If this reality was not going to crumble around him like a dream upon waking, then how was he supposed to get back to his friends?

He waited until the sounds of the house had stilled and he was sure his parents were asleep. Then he slid out of bed, got dressed, and clambered through his open window and down the side of the house to the dust below.

His father’s car was parked near the carved dirt track that led into town. Keith pulled himself up into the driver’s seat, but quickly found that he wouldn’t be able to reach the pedals while still looking out the windshield. The car wasn’t an option.

With the sun down, the temperature was much more comfortable than before. Keith did some quick calculations in his head, taking his shorter legs and lack of conditioning into account, and made his decision. He turned away from the car and walked into the featureless desert.

It took three hours on foot to reach the rocky canyon he’d explored all those years ago, when the Kerberos failure had driven him to obsession. He spotted the cave opening where he’d studied the lion hieroglyphics. But now, having seen Krolia’s memories of the place, he knew there was another way in. He slid and hopped his way down the incline, deeper into the canyon, until he found the hidden gap in the rock that led to the Blue Lion’s cavern.

There it was, just as he remembered it from that day the Voltron paladins finally assembled. It sat regal and quiet in the center of the cave, encased in its protective shield. Keith approached it slowly and placed his hand on the barrier. It was as solid as diamond. The Lion didn’t even twitch.

Keith suddenly felt very foolish for coming here. He’d sought out the closest available connection to his home reality – a Lion of Voltron. But this lion belonged to this reality. It didn’t recognize him, and even if it did, it couldn’t help him.

He needed the Black Lion. But the Black Lion of this reality was far out of reach on Arus, and his own Black Lion, well, it could be anywhere.

He reached out to it with his mind, searching for its consciousness like he’d done when he piloted it remotely during the battle for Earth. But there was only silence in the void. Black didn’t answer.

He knocked his fist lightly against the Blue Lion’s barrier, holding on to his composure even as he released a little frustration. “A lot of help you turned out to be,” he shouted up at Blue.

The sound of footsteps behind him made him spin and drop into a ready stance, reaching for a blade he didn’t have. Krolia flinched, too. She stood frozen at the mouth of the cave where she had been sneaking up on him, her eyes wide. Her muscles, though softened by peaceful Earth living, still coiled powerfully. Her reflexes answered Keith’s, and her hand twitched involuntarily toward the blade she wore on her belt. She stilled it, and curled it into a fist instead.

It sent a jolt through Keith’s heart to hear her say, “Who are you?” By the crack in her voice, it was breaking hers, too.

“I’m Keith,” he pleaded. She didn’t look convinced. The Blade of Marmora had drilled suspicion into her. Nothing but the truth would convince her now. He relented, “But not your Keith.”

He told her the situation – Haggar, the portal, the threat to all realities – as if he were giving a field report to Kolivan. Anything personal was irrelevant. All she needed to know was enough information to help him achieve his goal. But he’d already told her who he was, and it was impossible for her not to read between the lines. That he was even involved meant the idyllic childhood she’d tried to give him was over.

“I tried to keep you out of this war,” she said numbly. They sat on a rock side by side in the Blue Lion’s cave. Krolia stared at the opposite wall, her hands clasped in front of her mouth and her eyes barely focused. Unable to look Keith in the eye. “I’m trying to keep you out of this war. That’s why I stayed. Even if the Empire made it to Earth, I thought if I was careful enough, I could keep them from ever touching you.”

Keith looked away so he wouldn’t see the tears welling up in her eyes. “In this reality, you might succeed,” he said.

She grasped his arm, almost frantic. “What did I do wrong, in your reality? How do I stop this?” The ferocity flashing in her eyes reminded Keith of his Krolia – the soldier-spy. She looked past his childlike face and past even the young man she now knew was inside. She looked at him like he was an omen from her worst nightmares. Like if she cracked him open, he would yield the secret of how to make it all not true.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Keith blurted out. He hadn’t meant to tell her this much, but, strangely, he felt the need to defend his own mother from her counterpart. “In my reality, you knew the Blades had the best chance of ending the war before it reached Earth. You went back to them to protect me and dad. I grew up never knowing who you were.”

Krolia’s grip tightened on his arm and her voice got quiet. “How could I have done that?” Her slack-jawed disbelief gave Keith an inkling of the pain the other Krolia must have felt when she made that terrible decision.

“I found you,” he said, weakly, knowing it didn’t make up for all the years they’d lost. “Eventually.”

“What about your father?” Krolia demanded. Her fingers were digging into his arm now, hard enough to hurt. “He would never have let you leave Earth alone. Did he come with you? Did I see him again?”

Keith opened his mouth, preparing a comforting lie. There was no reason to cause her more pain. But he’d never lied to his mother before. The quantum abyss hadn’t allowed it, and by the time they’d escaped its visions, truth had become their habit. The lie faltered in his throat. “He died.”

Krolia let go of his arm. The intensity melted out of her face, and in an instant he was her son again. Both her sons – the one she was trying to save and the new, strange one who she could not. She folded him against her body and held him tight. He was so small that he disappeared into her embrace. They sat that way, wordless, for a long time as Keith enjoyed the feeling of being a child in his mother’s arms.

The Blue Lion stared past them, its eyes dark and impassive.

“Why did you come here?” Krolia finally said, without letting go.

Keith’s voice was muffled against Krolia’s jacket. “Voltron can cross between realities. I thought one of the Lions could help me. But it didn’t work. This isn’t my Lion.”

There was a long pause before Krolia drew back to look at Keith’s face. “Your Lion?”

“I’m a paladin of Voltron.”

Krolia shook her head in amazement. “I didn’t want this for you.”

“I’ve done a lot of good,” said Keith.

“Of course you have,” said Krolia, without a hint on condescension. “I’ve always known you had the potential to be great. But the time we’ve had together as a family has been so precious. That you had to do it all alone… it’s not worth it, Keith. It wasn’t worth it.”

* * *

Krolia took him home. Keith wasn’t sure how she’d managed to follow him in the car without him noticing, but when they emerged from the cave it was parked there at the top of the ridge. Krolia turned it around and followed her own tire tracks back the other way. In spite of himself, Keith’s tired little body leaned back in the cracked leather of the passenger seat and fell asleep.

He woke slowly, blinking against the dawn light streaming through his window. He wasn’t yet conditioned by war and abandonment to sleep fitfully and cautiously. His body hadn’t yet learned to anticipate the alarm, springing out of bed and turning it off before it could blare. There wasn’t even an alarm set here, that he could find. The sun was already high in the sky.

His thin cotton sheets were tangled around his legs, and sometime during the warm night he’d kicked his quilt down into a heap at the foot of the bed. As he straightened out the bedding and tugged it back into place, he looked around a room that was a strange variation on a familiar memory. The bed was the same - heavy pine frame topped with a worn-out mattress and the quilt made by some aunt or grandmother who’d died before he was born. The view from the window held a beautiful stretch of desert as well as the heat waves rising off the roof of the shack below.

But the rest of the details were different. There was a modern-looking set of drawers instead of the heavy old bureau that had wobbled whenever Keith tugged its handles too hard. A light fixture and a floor lamp gave off a pleasant glow when Keith flipped the switch, instead of the bare bulb Keith remembered hanging from his ceiling. As a child, he’d pinned his doodles to his walls. These walls had posters of music groups and TV shows, and several framed pieces of artwork in charcoal and colored pencil. Keith peered closer at them, wondering where they’d come from until he recognized his own signature in the bottom corner of each one. They were better than he ever remembered doing, better even than he could do now if he tried. He’d stopped drawing when he went into foster care.

He finished smoothing his quilt over the perfectly tucked sheets until the bed was made to Garrison standards. He stared at it a moment, then laughed at himself as he mussed the sheets back up. There was no need for military discipline here. He wouldn’t have to worry about such things until he met Shiro.

Shiro. So much had changed for Keith in this reality. Was Shiro’s life different, too? With a sudden surge of panic, Keith grabbed the datapad off his dresser and pulled up a web search. He didn’t relax until he found a little news article entitled, “Galaxy Garrison’s Finest: Takashi Shirogane, 17, set to become youngest interplanetary co-pilot.”

Keith grazed his fingers over the screen. Shiro looked so young in the photo. Keith already knew the story the article told, and beyond it. Shiro was so incredibly talented that he’d been confirmed for his first mission while he was still a cadet and had flown as soon as he’d graduated. It had gone so well, they’d given him command of the next one when he was twenty. When he got back, they’d started sending him out to high schools to do recruitment.

Maybe by that time, Keith could convince Krolia to let him go to public school instead of continuing her home lessons. Maybe by the time Shiro brought a flight simulator to the high school in the town down the road, Keith could be there to impress him.

He immediately felt guilty as he realized he was planning for years ahead in this reality instead of in his own. But if there was no way home, what else could he do?

As if to prove it to himself, Keith closed his eyes and groped about in the darkness of his mindscape for the Black Lion again. All he found were his own thoughts. Not feeling quite as disappointed as he should have been, Keith got dressed and went downstairs.

He followed the sounds of soft voices and hushed laughter to the kitchen. When he rounded the corner, his dad was at the sink, running water onto a small pile of pans and dishes. He might have been trying to wash them, but Krolia was perched on the counter beside him, distracting him with a kiss.

The moment was so tender that Keith almost backed out of the room to give them privacy, but they spotted him at once. As his dad turned, Keith braced himself for the pity and suspicion that would surely replace last night’s warm and easy familiarity now that they both knew who he was. It had been nice being little Keith, while it had lasted.

But his dad’s smile was still open, his posture casual and unconcerned, as he said, “You slept through breakfast.” His hands were wet and bubbly with dish soap, so he used one foot to point at the oven. “I kept a plate warm for you in there.”

Krolia hadn’t told him.

His dad turned back to the sink, so Keith was able to catch Krolia’s eye as he crossed the kitchen. He gave her a questioning glance as he passed. She answered with a helpless little shrug, as if she couldn’t explain it either.

Keith retrieved his plate with its pile of eggs scrambled with sausage, onions, and peppers and topped with what Keith now recognized as an irresponsible amount of cheese. He’d eaten this kind of breakfast at least weekly in his childhood, and the smell transported his memory just like the portal had transported his body. The eggs had gone a little dry and the cheese had gotten crusty in the oven while Keith slept in, but he devoured it happily while his dad finished with the dishes.

When the sink was empty, his dad grabbed his keys and pulled his vest off the hook by the door. “I oughta get going. I’m already going to be late for work.”

“Wait!” said Krolia. “Stay home today. You’ve been meaning to fix the backup generator.”

“I can do that this weekend.” He was pulling on his vest, his hand on the door.

Krolia searched for an excuse, stammering so subtly that no one but Keith, who’d spent two years inside her head, would have noticed it. “The weather report said there was a chance of a storm tomorrow night. You should make sure it’s working before then. Keith can help you.”

He peered at her, trying to decide why she was being so insistent. But finally he relented and hung his jacket back on the hook. “Well, as long as Keith helps me,” he said with a smile, and called his station to make his excuses.

Keith hesitated a moment before following his dad into the shack. Long ago he’d spent a manic, grief-filled year turning that shack into a spartan home as well as a shrine to obsession. But when he stepped through the doorway and allowed his eyes to adjust to the dim light inside, he found it as he remembered it when it was just a storage space for generations’ worth of his dad’s family’s junk. It was darker than Keith expected, because the windows were blocked by stacks of cardboard boxes with dented corners and labels scribbled one on top of the other in faded ink. Rust-edged machines and long-outdated appliances were stacked against the walls, power cords tangled and broken pieces jumbled together on the floor. Everything was coated in dust except for one corner containing a workbench and the sole functioning lamp.

Keith’s dad slid the broken generator out from under the workbench and sat beside it on the floor to tinker with it. He left the only chair for Keith, and called up to him whenever he needed a particular tool off the wall or a spare part out of the overhead cabinets. Keith had to climb up on the counter to reach some of them – he didn’t miss being so short.

But he had missed this: the quiet, comfortable way he’d once shared space with his father. Neither of them was the talkative type, and living out here there was only ever so much to talk about. They showed their love in acts, in touch, in the care they took of each other. A warmed-up plate of food. The way his dad would include him in everything he did, even things Keith had no aptitude for (like fixing generators). They didn’t need to say the words. Keith could feel it in the air between them, swirling with the dust motes.

Back when this had been his life, trust and love had been a given. Once lost, it had taken so much time and effort to get back that sense of safety. He might never have managed it without Shiro.

When he was sure his dad wasn’t paying attention, he pulled the datapad out of his back pocket and retrieved the article he’d saved earlier. Shiro’s teenage face re-appeared on the screen, smiling out at Keith. In another life, Shiro had saved him. Perhaps this was the reality where Keith could return the favor.

He could stop Shiro from going to Kerberos. He could lead the others to Voltron with none of the guesswork and risk it had taken the first time. With his knowledge of Zarkon’s tactics, of Haggar’s influence, and of Lotor’s plans, he could end the war in a single decisive strike. Sendak would never touch Earth. Haggar would never build her portal. Shiro would never die. Keith could rebuild what he’d had in his own reality, but better this time. All of the good with none of the suffering.

“Hey, dad?” said Keith. “How old do I have to be to start pre-screening for the Galaxy Garrison?”

His dad’s shoulder bobbed up and down as he twisted a screwdriver. At Keith’s words, he stopped mid-turn. “Keith, buddy,” he said, putting down his work and turning around. Keith switched off his datapad before his dad could see what he’d been looking at. “You know you can’t do that. The Galaxy Garrison is a government organization. They’d ask too many questions.”

Keith almost asked what he meant, but realized the obvious problem with his plan in time to catch his tongue. “Oh. Because of mom?”

“Of course because of mom,” his dad said, his forehead wrinkling. “We’ve been over this. Other people wouldn’t understand about her. That’s why there are some things we can’t do, like spend too much time in town or bring friends home. And we definitely can’t go anywhere near the Garrison.”

Some of Keith’s disappointment must have shown on his face, because his dad added, “I know it’s lonely sometimes, kiddo. But mom came here to protect us, so we gotta protect her too. She’s worth it.”

“Yeah,” Keith was quick to say, which seemed to satisfy his dad. But internally, he kept spinning out possibilities.

He could still get to Shiro even if he wasn’t part of the Garrison. But how to earn his trust? He could reach out to the other paladins. But how to lead them to the Blue Lion’s cave without any of them alerting Garrison command? Even if he managed to get them all to Arus, how would he lead the group if the Black Lion didn’t accept him right away? Or even worse, what if it _did_ accept him, leaving Shiro without a lion of his own?

The farther down the sequence of events Keith traveled, the more questions arose. He re-arranged the pieces again and again, looking for a guaranteed victory. But for every workaround, a new complication sprang up. For every fix, a new tangle.

* * *

Evening found the little family of three back in the living room of the main house, sprawled on the sofa or perched on chairs. They’d sat down for Keith’s study time hours ago, but that had quickly fallen by the wayside in favor of stories and laughter. Krolia regaled them with her intergalactic adventures, some of which Keith had heard before or even seen for himself in the quantum abyss, but many of which were new to him. Whenever his version of Krolia had talked about her past, it was usually to demonstrate some lesson about warfare or espionage. This Krolia avoided the uglier parts of her history and told them tales about carefree adventures on faraway, beautiful planets. She even teased a few stories out of Keith’s dad, who omitted the destroyed homes and burned bodies he must have seen in his line of work, and instead told of heroic saves and goofy pranks by his friends at the station.

When the shadows started to lengthen and the sky outside started to change color, Keith’s dad got up to peek out the window. “It’s gonna be a good one,” he said as he headed out the front door. Wordlessly, Krolia and Keith followed him outside.

The three of them sat on the bench on the porch, breathing in the still-warm air and looking out at the darkening landscape. The sun was still in the sky, but low enough that its filtered light made the clouds glow peach-pink and rust-red. The gradations of color swirled and shifted in slow motion as the clouds floated imperceptibly along.

Back when he was little and easily bored, he’d hated his dad’s habit of greeting an especially beautiful sunset by sitting on the porch in contemplative, statue-like silence. “You only get to see so many of these in your life,” he’d once said while preventing Keith from wriggling away to go play video games instead. In the years after he died, Keith had often wished he could return to the porch for one last sunset. He never thought he’d get the chance.

As the sun dipped lower, the high notes of yellow and orange faded and were replaced by luminous purples and blues. Krolia seemed to take up more and more of the bench as the evening stretched on, propping her legs up and leaning against Keith to force him closer to his dad. Nervously, Keith scooted across the bench to close the last of the distance and slid his little hand under his dad’s big, rough palm. After a second, the thick fingers closed to envelope his hand.

“We have a good kid,” Krolia said, talking fondly about him as if he weren’t there. Keith had heard the Holts talking like this over the top of Pidge’s head to embarrass and flatter her. Hunk’s family did it sometimes, and Lance’s too. He’d never had two parents together at the same time to do it about him.

“Yep,” his dad agreed.

“He’s smart. Strong. Brave,” Krolia went on, talking fast to keep her voice from wavering. “We’re so lucky to have him.”

The big hand surrounding Keith’s gave him a little squeeze. “That’s all true.”

“And we’re so proud of him, aren’t we?” Krolia tried to sound casual, but she couldn’t keep the urgency out of her voice.

Keith’s dad flicked his eyes over to Krolia, trying to decipher her tone. Then he glanced down at Keith and gave him a smile that was almost shy. He hated being put on the spot as much as Keith did, so he lifted his head and looked back at the sunset before replying, “Of course we are.”

That wasn’t enough for Krolia. “Tell him,” she said.

Keith couldn’t help but look up expectantly. His dad stiffened beside him, awkward when forced to turn his emotions into words. But when he looked down at Keith, his expression softened and he said, “I’m proud of you, Keith.” He let go of Keith’s hand to clasp his shoulder. “I love you so much.”

Keith dove into him, pressing his face against the thin cotton of his dad’s shirt to soak up the tears that were threatening to leak out of him. His dad returned the embrace, whispering to Krolia, “He okay?” Keith didn’t hear the response. He was too busy trying to disappear into his dad’s arms. He missed him so badly, all the time, and never more than at this moment. The tighter he held him, the deeper the pain of loss dug into him. The loss he’d already endured, and the loss that was soon to come.

Because the boy who got to grow up hearing those words from his father would never turn into the angry, lonesome outcast who Shiro had decided to protect. The boy who had a home and a family to fight for wouldn’t risk everything, as Keith had, again and again. Keith was who he was because of his scars, inside and out, like a broken cup pieced back together and the cracks filled in with gold. The boy forged in this reality would be a different kind of Keith, someone simpler and happier and walking a completely new path.

Even if he were to stay and try to replicate the events of his own reality, he could never get back what he’d lost. This timeline had branched off too early in his history. He could never re-create the bonds he’d forged with Pidge, Hunk, Lance, and Allura, especially if he tried to avoid all the old mistakes and hardships that had brought them closer together.

And Shiro most of all. Their relationship now was a monument to random chance and un-repeatable miracles and impossible luck. It had taken all that suffering to bring them to a place where they were together and in control of their destinies. It was foolish to think he could tease out the bad from the good. Touch any point on the timeline, and the outcome would change.

He could have his life as he knew it. Or he could have this life – his dad, his mom, a home, sunsets on the porch. But he couldn’t have both. And as vast and as deep as his love for his father was, he knew which one he would choose.

In the darkness behind his screwed-shut eyes, two points of light appeared. Two yellow slits opening to rhomboid apertures, swirling with quintessence. He hadn’t reached out to it this time, but somewhere in Keith’s mind the Black Lion opened its eyes. With a gentle, rumbling growl it called to him.

When the sun finished settling below the horizon and the night air began to cool, Keith’s dad stood up and stretched. He said something about going in early tomorrow to make up for the day he’d missed, and went inside to go to bed. As soon as the door closed behind him, Keith let the tears he’d been holding back fall. “Thank you,” he choked out between ragged breaths.

“I thought you might need to hear it from him,” said Krolia.

They sat in silence until the last wisps of color faded out of the sky. When his tears were dry and his voice was sure, Keith turned to his mom and said, “I know where my lion is.”

* * *

For the second night in a row, once the soft sounds of snoring came from the master bedroom upstairs, Krolia and Keith snuck away from the little oasis around their home and set off into the desert. Keith pointed the way down rough roads that were barely distinguishable from the desert rock on either side of them. A couple of times, they missed a turn and had to double back or cut across the sand. But Keith knew the way. Even more than half his lifetime later, even in darkness, even in another reality, he remembered where his father had died.

The lights of the little town where the fire station was winked in the distance as they gave it a wide berth. They carved a path through the dust and dirt, bumping downwards toward the lowlands near the river where cracked rock gave way to thin soil and scrubby grass. That grass could support livestock in the milder months. In the summer, it dried up so that the whole valley became a tinderbox waiting for a spark.

Keith leaned forward in his seat as they crested the last ridge, trying to spot the little ranch house and barn that were, in his reality, nothing but foundation and ashes now. They were missing here, too. In their place sat the Black Lion.

Krolia pulled the truck up as close as she dared to the shimmering aura surrounding the giant robot. To her credit, she barely flinched when Black stirred with a creaking of metal joints and turned to greet its paladin. As Keith hopped down from his seat, his lion knelt and opened its mouth to invite him inside.

Before he entered, he turned back to Krolia. She hugged herself, gripping her own jacketed shoulders though the night was not cold. She looked up at the Black Lion as if it were the war she had run from, about to devour the son she couldn’t save.

But Keith didn’t see it that way. “I want you to know,” he said, snapping Krolia’s attention away from the behemoth above her and back to the child at her feet, “I’m not alone. I have a family in my reality. We all came from different places, but we found each other. I have a future with them. I’ll always miss dad, and I wish I’d met you sooner. But mine isn’t the reality where it all went wrong. I’m happy, mom. I wasn’t always, but I got there.”

Krolia couldn’t answer, but she nodded her understanding and knelt to give him one last hug goodbye. Keith let it linger until he felt Black’s consciousness behind him pulse with impatience.

“One more thing,” he said as he pulled away. He retrieved his datapad from the passenger seat and flipped back through its saved files until the article he’d found earlier that day flashed onto the screen, a young Shiro’s smiling face just below the headline. He handed it to Krolia. “Make sure I meet him one day. I know getting involved with the Garrison is risky for you, and maybe this isn’t a reality where he and I end up… Anyway, whatever happens afterwards is fine. I just need to know there was a chance.”

As he turned and walked into the warped air around the Black Lion, he stepped out of the little boy whose form he’d borrowed. His perspective shifted in an instant as he doubled his height. His hair curled against his neck and around his face. Red armor settled heavy on his body.

He didn’t look back. All that lay behind him was a beautiful possibility, a fork off his path he’d passed by long ago. He was glad it existed. But it wasn’t his home.

He walked up the ramp of his lion’s mouth into darkness, then immediately back down it into blinding light. Before his eyes could adjust to see where he was, Shiro appeared out of the glare, running to meet him halfway up the ramp. Each of them caught the other in his arms and hung on in desperate relief. Keith caught sight of the others over Shiro’s shoulder, waiting for him.

“You made it,” Shiro murmured, his face still buried in Keith’s hair. He gripped the edges of Keith’s armor, shaking, his inhumanly strong prosthetic squeezing too tight for comfort.

Keith had his family around him. His mother in his life. Both sides of his heritage within his reach. The man he loved in his arms. No matter what hardships he’d faced to get here, he could accept no outcome but this.

It had been worth it after all.


	6. Allura

Honerva stood on the stormy plain, her loose hair whipping violently in the wind. Sincline stood over her, offering no comfort and no reproach.

When the clouds began to amass above her and thunder rumbled nearby, she stepped into the field of warped space-time around the ship and slowly climbed aboard.

Sincline popped out of the gap in the rift like a cork out of a bottle. It, and Honerva, whirled back into the rending chaos of the multiverse she had destroyed.

If she couldn’t have this reality, they all might as well burn.

* * *

[](https://twitter.com/wallmakerrelict/status/1222746214728269824?s=20)

Allura knew where she was before she opened her eyes.

She’d known she would pass through other realities when she entered the rift. With Haggar’s machine driving the portal, she had reason to believe that their path would not be completely random, but would hone in on their shared history. Though Haggar was looking for her son, she could not divide herself from her origins. She was of Altea. She knew Alfor and Melenor. She knew their young daughter. In some version of Haggar’s perfect reality, there had to be an Allura who got a chance to grow up with her family, under the sky of her homeworld. In Voltron’s desperate flight through the void to catch her, there had to be a chance Allura would glimpse that reality.

As they’d careened into the light, Allura had steeled herself against the possibility. If she were to find such a reality, she couldn’t let it distract her from her mission.

But she was unprepared for soft dirt beneath her slippered feet and warm sun on her face. For the breeze gently tugging at her limbs by the silky fabric of her robes. For the smell. The smell damaged her resolve the most. She’d forgotten the subtleties of fresh air in the unique mix of atmospheric gases that could not be replicated by any of the planets she’d visited since, nor even by the Castle-ship. With it came the mustiness of soil, the tang of grass, and, most tellingly, the sweetness of flowers – much stronger than the slight waft that had come from the single plant Colleen had grown for her.

She opened her eyes, already brimming with bitter tears, to a field of juniberries.

And all she could think was how unfair it was to make her give this up all over again.

* * *

Everything was as she remembered it.

Altea was a shining jewel of a planet. The countryside sprawled and rolled with green hills, crystalline lakes, and deep valleys studded with juniberry flowers. The sky was clear and bright and fantastically blue. Warmth seeped from the ground and floated with the breeze as the planet captured the sun’s rays in its humid air and rich soil. Occasionally one of the great planetary rings would rotate into view, a band of silver tethering one horizon to the other.

The capitol city was set among the natural splendor like a crown, its glittering spires rising out of domed halls and towers, all connected by walkways and arches in a delicate lattice. On the ground level, a warren of roads twisted and turned between the buildings, narrowing into alleys and bursting into open squares. The whole city teemed with people. They flowed along the roads and walkways like water, rushing along the thoroughfares and pooling in the plazas, a sea of life and color. More Alteans than had been seen in one place for ten thousand years.

It was dizzying to look at them. Alteans of every shade and shape, in every garb and style from across the planet. Romelle had told Allura of the survivors in Lotor’s colony, and by her description they’d been almost exclusively fair-skinned continentals like Romelle herself, brown midlanders like Allura, and olive coasterlings – the three most common of old Altea’s people, and even they were cut off from their ancestral cultures by millennia of refugeeism. But in this reality, Allura saw Alteans as black as onyx with bright tassels woven into their braids, small-statured Alteans weighed down with layers upon layers of colorful woven hoods and shawls, Alteans with wide faces and big eyes who wore thick jewelry in their ears, noses, and lips. A rainbow of races and cultures that didn’t exist anymore in her reality and never would again.

This wasn’t like the trick of her father’s hologram, or the cruel victory of the Altean Empire, or a sinister fever dream. It was a real Altea, the one she knew and loved.

Rising above the city was the palace, a monument to Altean architecture with soaring arches and blunted spires of white polymer accented in glowing blue, each tower dotted with balconies and ringed with open-air walkways. Allura had many fond memories of walking those narrow paths, peering down at the bustle of the city below through the gaps in the railing. Now she did so once more, following her parents along a high walkway spanning one castle tower to the next.

It was difficult to keep her eyes off Alfor and Melenor. They were like ghosts made flesh, every mannerism uncanny in its familiarity. When she’d first seen them, it had taken a force of will not to throw herself, sobbing, into their arms. She remembered her mother’s comfort, her father’s steadfastness, and she longed to lay all her losses and doubts at their feet. But in another way, it was remarkably easy to stay quiet. Being reunited with her parents had instantaneously reminded her of what it was like to be a child in their presence. The events of the intervening years fell away in the face of their easy affection and light conversation. It was as if she’d never left.

She matched her strides to her mother’s, but soon fell behind on legs shorter than she was used to. Melenor reached back to take her hand as they walked, making sure they stayed side by side. It was surreal to look at her face. People had always told Allura how much she looked like her mother, and she supposed they were right, but as a gangly child it had been difficult to compare herself to someone so mature and elegant. Now she saw all the poise and grace she remembered, but she also saw the face that had stared back at her from the mirror this last year or so.

Alfor hurried ahead until Melenor swatted the back of his arm. With a sheepish smile, he slowed to his daughter’s pace. He was just as she remembered him - masterful and dashing in robes of white and gold, his beard neatly trimmed and his eyes sparkling. The last time he’d looked like that, Allura had thought there was nothing he couldn’t do. Now she searched him fruitlessly for any sign of the hesitation and weakness that, in her reality, had cost Altea the war.

“Are you excited about the start of the Juniberry Festival?” said Melenor.

“Of course!” said Alfor, gesturing to the city below where a predominance of pink decorations signaled the holiday season. “It’s my favorite time of year.”

Melenor laughed and scolded him, “I was talking to your daughter.” She gave Allura a conspiratorial roll of her eyes, expecting her also to laugh at Alfor’s enthusiasm.

But Allura couldn’t manage a laugh. She was barely able to answer, “Yes, mother.”

Alfor patted her hair and said with a smile, “We’ll have to get you a dress the same color as the juniberries, so you won’t get so upset when you spill juice on it.”

“Don’t tease her!” said Melenor.

Every word from their mouths eroded Allura’s resolve. It was so glorious being back in their presence, she had to constantly remind herself not to get too attached. She would soon have to say goodbye again, when she returned to her own reality.

She didn’t know how she would do it, but finding the Blue Lion seemed like a good place to start.

Her lion might have been anywhere - away on a mission, or on its paladin’s planet of Nalquod, out of Allura’s reach. But if it happened to be on Altea, it would be in Voltron’s hangar off the east wing of the palace, among Alfor’s workshops and laboratories. As soon as Allura was able to slip away from her parents, she headed that way, walking quickly and dodging into alcoves to stay out of sight whenever she heard voices down the side halls. Alfor had never liked her getting too close to his research.

She was standing at an intersection, trying to remember the way to the hangar, when a voice called out to her from behind, “Hey there, little ‘Lura.” She recognized it, not only for its familiar timbre, but for its charming casualness. No one else would have dared to speak to the Princess of Altea like that.

Blaytz sauntered toward her, his gait unhurried, his smile easy and broad. He caught Allura so off guard that all the restraint she’d brought to bear when seeing her parents again disappeared, and she couldn’t stop herself from running down the hall and throwing herself into his arms. Blaytz had been Alfor’s friend long before Voltron, before Allura’s birth, even before Zarkon. He’d visited Altea often in Allura’s youth, and she’d thought of him as a favorite uncle. Seeing him now made her feel even more acutely how much she’d missed him.

Despite its suddenness, Blaytz didn’t seem to mind the outpouring of affection. He only scooped Allura up and twirled her a little as she embraced him. “What was that for?” he chuckled as he set her back on her feet.

Allura bit her cheek to hold back tears. “I’m just so happy to see you.”

Blaytz laughed, “I’ve been on Altea for a quintant already. I would have thought you’d start to get tired of me. What are you doing all the way over in the east wing?”

It took Allura only a half-tick of stammering before she thought of an excuse. “I was looking for father,” she said.

“Me, too! Your father called all the paladins to a meeting in the lions’ hangar. It sounded urgent.” Blaytz leaned against the wall without a hint of urgency. “I’ll send Alfor to find you when we’re done.”

“I want to come to the meeting.”

Blaytz bared his teeth in an exaggerated grimace. “Are you sure? It’s bound to be boring. I would die for Alfor, but when he gets going about Voltron no one can stop him, not even me. He’s all, _transdimensional ore_ this and _Altean alchemy_ that and I understand about every fifth word of it, but it seems to make him happy when I nod along.”

Even if she hadn’t been on a mission to find the Blue Lion, Allura could think of nothing better than learning about Voltron and Altean alchemy from her father. “I’m sure,” she said.

“Then let’s go,” said Blaytz, chivalrously offering her his bent arm.

He led her through the hallways, stooping slightly so she wouldn’t have to reach for his elbow. Allura couldn’t stop staring at him. This, she realized, was what a Blue Paladin ought to be. Though Voltron could not exist without every single lion, Blue was especially the soul of the team. The one who brought its disparate elements together with a carefree spirit and a lover’s soul. Blaytz could cut through Zarkon’s seriousness, soften Alfor’s recklessness, uplift Trigel’s brilliance, nurture Gyrgan’s strength, and do it all with a smile on his face.

The Blue Lion must have seen something of Blaytz in Allura, but she couldn’t help feeling like a pale imitation. If she had ever shared his spark, hers had dimmed under the oppressive smother of loss and war.

Allura was still lost in thought when the hangar doors slid open. The five lions of Voltron lined the room, and the other paladins were already inside. She gasped to see them all assembled, not in Haggar’s strange dreamscape but flesh and blood, her father standing strong and unafraid amidst his friends. Trigel and Gyrgan flanked him, the three of them turning toward the door as it opened. Behind them loomed Zarkon. Allura suppressed a flinch at the sight of the face that had haunted her dreams.

But when he spoke, Allura didn’t hear the fearsome dictator she’d once fought. He sounded resigned, even long-suffering, as he sighed, “Good of you to finally join us, Blaytz.”

“Thanks for waiting up for me,” said Blaytz unapologetically as he strode into the room like he owned it.

Alfor rushed past Blaytz to intercept Allura before she could follow him any farther inside. “I see you saw fit to bring my daughter when I asked you to come alone.”

“Aw, let her stay,” said Blaytz. “Now, what’s the big problem that we all needed to… What is that!?”

Allura finally tore her eyes away from the paladins and looked closer at their lions behind them, fanned out around the perimeter of the room. Blaytz was staring at Blue, and for obvious reason – though the other lions looked as ordinary as giant felids crafted of trans-reality ore were capable, the Blue Lion seemed to shimmer with an opalescent aura. Allura recognized it immediately as the same shifting, oily surface of Haggar’s portal. It was the rift she’d come from. Her way home.

Alfor addressed the paladins, “I discovered it when I came to run routine diagnostics on our lions this morning. As you can see, the anomaly seems to be centered on the Blue Lion.”

“It certainly is,” said a voice that made Allura flinch and whirl to find its source. There was a sixth person in the hangar, holding some kind of sensor and crouched as near as she dared to the diffraction surrounding Blue. She was facing the other way, but Allura’s heart raced as she recognized Haggar.

The witch continued to speak, “It will take me some time to interpret this data. So far, my readings make little sense. This is a rift leading to the space between realities, similar to the one on Daibazaal. But its properties are quite different. And at its heart there seem to be two Blue Lions, superimposed on one another at a quantum level.”

“Why did it have to be _my_ lion?” Blaytz whined.

“Honerva,” said Alfor, ignoring Blaytz. “I hate to insinuate, but you’ve been researching the rift on Diabazaal since it was formed. Is there any way that your probing might have led to the formation of a second rift?”

Haggar didn’t hesitate before saying emphatically, “No.”

“You seem awfully sure,” said Alfor, sounding dubious.

Zarkon explained. “No testing has been performed on the rift in phoebs. Honerva has given the order to monitor it only, with research to resume after we’ve accounted for its instability.”

“You’ve stopped research? But Honerva, you were learning so much!”

Haggar sounded defensive. “The knowledge wasn’t worth the risk. The rift is dangerous. It has the potential to be a source of great power, and we all want to see that dream realized. But above all we must be cautious.”

“Honerva, you were always the careful one. Where is your hunger for scientific discovery?”

“I will discover all there is to know about the rift and quintessence, in due time. But I will not overreach our safety measures. The power the rift holds is a great gift, and under my watch I will never allow it to turn into a threat.”

After that, the conversation quickly devolved into an argument about how best to quarantine the Blue Lion while Honerva continued to study it.

So that was the difference between Allura’s reality and this one. This was the reality where Honerva was not consumed by ambition and lust for power, the reality where the rift yielded the lions and nothing more. No horrors, no monsters, no corruption, no war.

Allura mulled this over as she slipped away from the meeting and left the hangar. Now that she knew where the rift was, she could return to the Blue Lion and go back to her own reality at any time. But the more she thought about it, the more distant the idea became. To walk out of this perfect world, through that shimmer, to be blasted back into chaos and war, seemed like lunacy. She had everything she needed here, everything she’d ever wanted or dreamed.

She’d sacrificed so much. Chipped away at herself for the sake of a future that didn’t care for her. Back there, she faced a slow fade into obscurity and irrelevance as the broken remnants of Altea straggled on. But here, Altea was whole and bright, poised on the edge of a future Allura had only dreamed of since waking up in the pod on Arus.

If Honerva, for all her crimes, could steal herself a second chance, then Allura deserved one too.

* * *

Allura submerged herself in her family and her world. It was her favorite time of year, when she and her mother wore matching gauzy dresses and Coran complained about the heat. The juniberry festival was fast approaching, and Allura volunteered to help prepare. For the first quintant or so, she kept looking over her shoulder as if she might be caught at any moment by someone who knew she shouldn’t be here. But it was the most natural thing to slip right back into her old habits and ways until it didn’t even seem out of place.

She tried to put unwanted thoughts out of her mind – duty, friendship, the people who were counting on her back in some other reality. They were a phantom echo, like Hira’s Empire, like the Guns of Gamara. They had their own troubles, but they had nothing to do with her. She was in her own reality, and she had duties here.

This was where she could belong, where she had a future that made sense to her. Here, she could slot herself into the old ways of her people like a perfect puzzle piece. She would never have to struggle or fight to find her place in an uncertain world. All she had to do was follow her father as he guided Altea in tradition that had lasted for millennia.

She didn’t return to the lions’ hangar. Only Honerva’s occasional worried mutterings and Blaytz’s petulant mood reminded her of the Blue Lion’s predicament – caught between realities, waiting for her to unstick it.

She was thinking of the lion again, several quintants after her arrival, when her father called her name to direct her attention back to his lesson. She shook her head and re-focused with a curt apology. They were in the star map room, a beautiful dome-shaped structure within the palace housing a single small projector. It was currently filling the entire room with a hologram of Altea, its moons, and its neighboring worlds – shipping routes, asteroid belts, space stations, solar currents, and even political connections depicted flowing between the planets each in their unique colors and patterns.

“You might find it dull to be in this stuffy room when it is so beautiful outside,” said Alfor. “But you will need this expertise when you are older, and ruler of Altea.”

“I don’t find it dull,” said Allura. And she was being truthful. She loved the star map. It was as beautiful as the sunny scene outside, and just as much a cherished memory reclaimed. She had spent much time in her youth studying this map with her father, learning the ins and outs of the sociopolitical climate of their star system and galaxy. She relished being back. She just had to put other things out of her mind.

Alfor didn’t seem to believe her, because he got a mischievous look on his face. “Let’s make things a little more interesting. You’re familiar with our closest neighbors. Let’s go a little farther afield.” He sank his hand into the hologram, gripped it, and flung it. Lights flashed as the projected Altea sped through the wall and out of sight, replaced by blackness and stars. Alfor spun the view again, now bringing new planets into view. Allura smiled to recognize the Dalterion Belt, home to Trigel and her species.

“We were once in a trade war with Dalterion,” Alfor mused. “It got quite heated. In my grandfather’s time, it nearly came to violence. It was Trigel who put her reputation on the line to broker an alliance with Daibazaal and, through Zarkon, negotiate a treaty with me. She is a cunning woman. I’m glad we are friends now, because I would not want to be her enemy. Where shall we go next?”

He spun the hologram again. Stars flashed too fast for Allura to keep up.

“Rygnirath,” Alfor announced as a new planet slowed and stopped in front of Allura. “We Alteans once dismissed it as a primitive planet. But Gyrgan has shown me that what his people lack in technological advancement they make up for in resilience, integrity, and loyalty. Now, you choose. Let’s find a new planet to visit.”

Allura waved her hands, the hologram swirling with her every movement. Back before the war, she might have scrolled randomly through the galaxies, admiring planets that piqued her curiosity or that she found pretty. But now she had traveled to many of these places, and she could not help but fall into patterns she knew well.

Before long, a watery planet with a halo of atmosphere-breaking mountains came into view.

“Tell me about it,” said Alfor, still quizzing her.

“Olkarion,” said Allura, earning an impressed nod from Alfor. “Their people interface mentally with technology, making them the finest known engineers and machinists.” She did not add what she should not be able to know – that when deprived of their polymers and metals, the Olkari were innovative enough to ply their talents to nature as well. They did not let loss stop them from discovering new gifts.

She spun the view again.

“Taujeer,” she said as a yellow planet with a cracked surface appeared, not waiting for Alfor’s prompting. “It’s a volatile planet with an acidic core. The natives need to keep the planet in strict balance to keep it from becoming unstable and consuming itself.” She did not tell him that, when the planet finally betrayed its inhabitants, they left on arks loaded with their most precious resource – not their art, not their technology, but their people.

“How do you…” Alfor muttered, his eyebrows furrowing. But he trailed off as Allura kept spinning the hologram, faster and faster. The named and marked planets, the carefully researched dossiers and notes, the colorful routes and political analyses became sparser and sparser before petering out entirely as she left the highly trafficked parts of space and entered a much younger solar system. The third planet from its star was an uncut gem of blue and green set among monochrome rocks and gas giants. Altea’s map had no information on it other than its designation: X-9-Y. Allura knew it as Earth.

It lay outside any contact from any civilized planet. There was nothing of note on it or any of its neighbors. Allura knew that even if she traveled there right now, she would find nothing more than a few early humans hunting and gathering their way through a wild world. Humans had not yet tamed their own planet, let alone set their sights on the stars.

But in time, Earth would yield up beautiful cities and vibrant cultures. Technological advancement that, while still primitive, was achieved at a staggering rate. It would yield the Galaxy Garrison. In ten thousand years’ time, it would yield a boy from an island nation with a big heart hidden behind a cocky grin. A boy worthy of the Blue Lion’s love, and Allura’s.

But in this reality, the Blue Lion would never know him. It would sit suspended in its quantum state forever. And Allura would never know him, either. Without the lifespan-extending effects of quintessence, she would be long dead by the time a new generation of paladins arose on that little blue planet. Her family, the one she’d found and fought for, would go on without her. The future she’d imagined with them would not belong to her.

And she had, she realized, imagined a future with them. For all her nostalgia and despair, there had been a thread of hope. A promise of a new family. Hard work ahead of her. Lance’s love guiding her. Even with her eyes fixed on the past, a new kind of happiness had blossomed around her, and she yearned for it as much as she had ever yearned for her lost childhood.

She thought once more of the Blue Lion and the rift encasing it, a monument to her cowardice. Instead of uplifting her people as Blaytz had done, as Lance had done in his time as Blue Paladin, Allura had turned her back on them. She’d turned her back on Lance. She’d turned her back on the future in service of the past when it should have been the other way around.

The peace she’d enjoyed these few quintants had been lost long ago, as had this family. They belonged to some other Allura, now. But she’d made a new family. And with her friends by her side, she had to make a new peace.

Alfor had been staring at her with alarm, but now his expression knotted into worry. “My daughter,” he said, reaching out to her. “Why are you crying?”

Allura fell to her knees and, sobbing, told him everything.

* * *

In a small conference room in a remote wing of the palace, behind a locked door, Allura stood still as Honerva flitted around her with a sensor in her hand. She’d been taking readings for several doboshes, and the silence was stretching on awkwardly. Her parents hovered nearby, Melenor watching the proceedings tensely while Alfor stared at the wall with hard eyes.

The rest of the paladins were there, too, waiting nervously for the verdict. Honerva finally put her equipment down and said, “She speaks the truth. Her body is like the Blue Lion – two Alluras quantumly entangled.”

“What should we do?” said Trigel. “How can we separate them?”

Allura explained, “I arrived in the Blue Lion. The anomaly around it is my doing. I must return to the Blue Lion and travel back through the rift. It will close after me, and the Allura of this reality will be free of me.”

“The reality you’ve come from…” said Gyrgan. “What you’ve described sounds like a nightmare. You cannot mean to go back. You may not be the Allura of this reality, but we still must protect you.”

Zarkon put a hand on Gyrgan’s shoulder to silence him. “She has made her choice. It is not our place to hold her back.”

While they argued, Allura glanced at where Blaytz was leaning against the wall nearby. He looked troubled, and uncharacteristically did not join in the debate. But when he caught Allura looking at him, he quirked a small smile and winked. “Blue Paladin,” he said, quiet enough that only she could hear. “Nice.”

Melenor cut through the discussion with the resonant, authoritative voice she usually reserved for her queenly duties. “My daughter’s fate will not be put to a vote. She stays.”

“My friend,” said Honerva softly. “If this Allura does not return to her own reality, the rift will remain open and unstable. The Blue Lion will remain unusable. And the daughter you know will remain subsumed by this other version.”

Alfor stepped forward, his face still grave. The other paladins stepped aside to let him pass. Even Honerva backed away from Allura’s side. He placed his hands on Allura’s shoulders and looked deeply into her eyes for the first time since she’d confessed her story. “With alchemy, we have rewritten the rules of reality. With quintessence and the trans-reality ore, we have harnessed a power beyond our understanding. What good is all that power if it cannot save my child?”

His eyes glowed. Everyone took another step back. Allura almost raised her hands to stop him, but her body was gripped by a force that shook her to her very atoms. The same power she’d touched through the teludav, that she’d conducted at the Balmera, that she’d claimed in Oriande, that she’d poured into Sincline, now she felt it pouring into her. She couldn’t move or breathe or even think. The room and its occupants swirled and blurred around her as she was shaken out of space-time.

And then suddenly snapped back. She was whole and in focus, returned to her body. The room was sharp and clear around her, as were the people surrounding her who shouted and gasped. She looked down at herself to find her gauzy dress gone, replaced by her pink armor. Her hair didn’t flow freely, but was tied up in her practical braids and bun. She was taller. She was herself again, displaced by ten thousand years of waiting and hardened by war.

Alfor’s left hand rested on her shoulder. But his other hand was on the shoulder of another girl. Allura turned her head to find her double, the younger version of herself she’d hijacked to exist in this world. She blinked back at Allura quizzically.

Alfor pulled both of them into an embrace. “They are both my daughter,” he said. “I will keep them both safe.”

“But the rift…” Honerva tried weakly.

“If I can separate one Allura from another, I can separate the Blue Lions as well. I can close the rift, sealing this reality off from whatever chaos is being wrought in the rest of the continuum. And if I cannot, I will destroy the Blue Lion and the rift with it before I let it take Allura back to that war.”

* * *

The arguing went on for some time. Though Allura tried to join in, it was clear that no one was interested in listening to her. They still saw her as a child instead of the warrior she had become. So she fell silent and let her parents and Gyrgan shout for her protection while Honerva, Zarkon, and Trigel reasoned with them for the sake of the space-time continuum.

She tried not to look at the other Allura, who looked so young and fragile now that they no longer shared a body. The little girl in the gauzy dress didn’t look at her either, but allowed Melenor to fold her protectively into her arms. Allura couldn’t imagine what she must have been thinking. To have her body stolen, only to be released in the midst of a heated argument and faced with her older, war-torn double? No wonder she buried her face in Melenor’s dress and didn’t speak. She was surely eager for her strange and uninvited twin to disappear.

A blue-skinned hand landed on her shoulder, and Blaytz pulled Allura to his side. He’d remained quiet, and Allura wasn’t yet sure which side of the argument he agreed with, but she was comforted when he patted her twice on the back before letting her go. She was glad he didn’t scoop her up like Melenor was doing to the other Allura, like Blaytz might have done to comfort her back when she was young. Instead, he only showed her quiet solidarity from one soldier, one Blue Paladin, to another.

When it became clear that the paladins would not reach a consensus, they dispersed for the night. Allura half hoped she would be able to slink away in the confusion and return to her lion, but Alfor caught her by the arm and guided her back toward her chambers.

“I cannot stay,” she said. Though she tried to muster all her resolve, her voice wavered in the face of her father’s seriousness. “My duty lies in my own reality. There’s someone waiting for me there. I love him. I promised myself to him. I must go back. I want to go back!”

“No duty and no love is worth your life,” said Alfor. “When I close the rift, you will learn to see that this was always meant to be your home.”

He delivered her to her room and closed the door behind him when he left. As soon as Allura was sure he was gone, she tried the door. It was locked from the outside.

Allura tried every seam in the walls, every appliance, every vent for a possible escape. Eventually she was forced to accept her imprisonment, and sat down on her bed in a huff. She was too wound up to think of sleeping, though it was late. Alfor could be in the hangar right now, decoupling her Blue Lion from Blaytz’s, destroying her only route home. She cursed every heartbeat she’d wasted in this reality. She hadn’t taken the chance to go home when she’d had it, and now she might never get the chance again.

Vargas passed. It grew dark outside. Allura paced the room, trying to wear herself out enough to sleep, hoping she would get another chance to reason with her father in the morning. But just when she was considering removing her armor to get comfortable, there was a quiet knock at the door. Allura rushed to it, speaking into the gap, “Who’s there?” Perhaps it was Trigel, Zarkon, or Honerva coming to set her free. Of course, it might also be her parents getting ready to move her somewhere more secure. Or even Blaytz, who hadn’t yet shown his hand, but who seemed to respect her as a paladin and might listen to her if she begged him to take her to her lion.

But it was none of them. When the door slid open, Allura found herself looking into a mirror. It was her younger self, the Allura of this reality. She’d swapped her summery dress for a pair of sturdy breeches, a long-sleeved blouse, and a rigid vest that closed with buckles down her side. Allura recognized it as the outfit she’d once worn to ride sky-kites. Not quite armor, but perhaps the closest to it that she’d owned. Apparently this little Allura thought it was appropriate costume for a prison break.

“Come with me,” said the other Allura, beckoning as she hurried toward the east wing.

Allura followed her gratefully, and only a little bitterly. She was relieved to be free of her room and on her way back to her lion. But she would have liked to be sent off by all her loved ones with their blessing and respect for her decision, not thrown away by her double, who must have been eager to be rid of the interloper.

Out of respect for the younger girl’s apparent distaste for her, Allura stayed silent as they crept together through the halls of the castle, dodging the nighttime guards and servants as they went. When they reached the empty halls around Alfor’s labs, which led to the lions’ hangar, the other Allura finally spoke.

“Father has been with the Blue Lion all evening, trying to close the rift,” she whispered. “So far he hasn’t managed it. He’s just gone to bed. Now is our chance.”

“Thank you,” Allura answered as they walked. “I know you didn’t ask for this.”

The other girl turned to her, and Allura was surprised to see fond tears in her eyes instead of the stubborn resentment she’d expected. “Neither did you,” she said.

They reached the hangar and slipped inside. There were the five lions, and there was Blue, beautiful wreathed in the trans-dimensional portal around it. Allura reached out, ghosting her hand over the edge of the distortion.

“Your reality is a blessed one,” she told her younger self. “Please enjoy the life you have ahead of you.”

But the other Allura dodged in front of her, blocking her from her lion. “Please enjoy it in my place,” she said, her voice shaking. “I’ve brought you here so I might borrow your courage to do what I must. I will go through the rift, and finish your war.”

Allura was speechless. Now she understood the sturdy clothes, the determined expression, the quiet resolve. She should have seen it sooner. Even as a child, she’d been eager to prove herself. After the destruction of Altea, she’d been hungry for vengeance. She should have known this Allura would not back down from a fight. “You cannot. It is not your place.”

“We are both Allura,” she argued. “The rift will accept me as well as you.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

Tears formed in the corners of the younger girl’s eyes as she said, “Since you arrived, I’ve been awake within my own body. I heard your thoughts, I saw your memories. You were right before, when you planned to stay here: after everything you’ve suffered, all you’ve sacrificed, you deserve this peace more than I do. I, who have taken it for granted my whole life.” She planted her feet and balled her fists. “Now is my chance to do my part.”

Allura felt her heart swell as she was overcome with love for this younger version of herself. So bold, so righteous, so sure of herself even though she was afraid. So ready to throw herself into a conflict she did not understand. To use up her light in service to her people. Allura thought of the times she’d done the same – urging her father to fight instead of flee, offering herself to the Balmera, volunteering to run the giant teludav, pushing a self-destructing robeast out of Earth’s atmosphere. She’d been lucky each time to survive. The young Allura had not yet learned what she had learned: that it is harder, and more valuable, to be a leader than a martyr.

“Don’t be so eager to sacrifice yourself,” Allura told her, taking the smaller girl’s face in her hands. “We have each been dealt our fates, and we must each forge a new way forward within them. This peace belongs to you. Now I go to make my own.”

Gently, she turned until she’d traded places with the other Allura. Now the smaller girl stood facing the Blue Lion, and Allura herself felt the rift at her back. Without letting go of her sister’s face, she stepped backwards and let the distortion surround her. Immediately, she felt the void calling her back the way she’d originally come. Back to her lion, back to her friends. She planted her feet and peered through the rift back at her own young face.

Reaching through the barrier between worlds, she put her arms around the girl she used to be and held her tight. Her voice reverberated within the rift as she gave her one last piece of advice. “The nature of the universe is the old giving way to the new. And you, Allura, are the new.”

She let her younger self go and turned toward her lion. It knelt, inviting her into her own future, and she walked toward the light.


	7. The New

[](https://twitter.com/wallmakerrelict/status/1225141045714804736?s=20)

The void between realities was more beautiful than Allura could have imagined. She stood atop a mirror pane reflecting the soft motes of light surrounding her, each speck refracting into a rainbow ring. Through the haze and glare, bright enough to make her head hurt, she saw shapes moving through the lightscape. One small, one broad. Two standing very close together. One rushing toward her. 

“Allura!” Lance called as he caught her up in his arms. 

She happily returned his embrace, only to falter and drag them both down to their knees. The light was getting brighter, making her eyes water and her head pound. Lance’s outline blurred and flickered in front of her, and though she tried to focus on his face she instead saw a hundred strangers in quick succession, countenances overlapping until she couldn’t pick even one person out of the crowd. Lance’s lips were moving, but all she heard was a cacophony of voices all speaking over each other, words lost in the confusion and noise. A terrible vertigo gripped her. Even though the ground felt solid under her, she had the sensation of falling endlessly. 

“What’s the matter with her?” Allura could barely make out Lance’s question before another onslaught of light and sound made her double over, screwing her eyes shut and covering her ears. 

“She is like me,” said a new voice, one that didn’t belong to Allura’s companions nor any of the ghostly shouts that crowded her mind. This voice cut through the interference as if spoken directly into her ear. 

Allura carefully opened her eyes to find her friends fanned out in front of her, shielding her from the figure moving toward them. They were hazy and indistinct, their shapes washed out by the light and only identifiable by the smears of color on their armor. The newcomer, however, was crystal clear. Honerva threw back her hood to show Allura the glowing marks on her face. “You think this place exists outside of reality, but the Chosen perceive the truth. This is not a gap, but a nexus. It is all realities.” 

It was undeniably true - as Allura became slowly accustomed to the barrage of sensation, she began to tease out individual threads from the mesh. Realities upon realities, layered so thick on top of one another that even if Allura leafed through them for the rest of eternity she would never find the bottom. Supernovas and gas giants and volcanic eruptions and seedlings breaking ground and people. So many people, speaking languages Allura couldn’t understand and taking forms she would never have expected. Loving each other and killing each other and protecting each other and betraying each other and living in every way it is possible to live. Each image vied for Allura’s attention until she felt herself stretched thin over innumerable iterations. 

It was beautiful and horrible and the strain of it was so much Allura felt sure it would soon kill her. She held tight to Lance and tried to focus on what was in front of her. But the other realities refused to be drowned out. 

Honerva staggered a little as she sat down on the ground, seeming unconcerned by the paladins arrayed before her. She crossed her legs and stared into the searing brightness around her. “It is as good a place as any to witness the end of all things.” 

Some of the paladins reached for their bayards, but Allura stopped them with a hoarse, “Wait! Killing her now won’t repair the damage she’s done. Let me talk to her.” 

They glanced back and forth at each other, trying to decide what to do. Only Lance didn’t hesitate. He helped Allura to her feet, and the others parted to let her through. 

Standing and walking in her state seemed impossible, but Allura forced herself to do it. She pushed through the distraction and disorientation to keep herself upright, and put one foot in front of the other. Each wobbly step came easier than the last, and for a moment Allura thought she was getting stronger. But then came the horrifying realization: she only felt better because the sensory noise of the realities around her was diminishing as, one by one, they winked out of existence and were silenced. 

When Allura sat down in front of Honerva, exhausted even from her short walk, Honerva looked up and sneered. “We don’t have much time left. Don’t waste it arguing with me. It’s already done.” Her voice was tired, sweat made her temples dewy, and her hands were shaking slightly in her lap. Though she was hiding the effects better than Allura could, Honerva also felt the press of the remaining realities on her mind. And, like Allura, she must have felt them dying, countless more with each moment that passed. 

“I don’t want to argue,” said Allura. “I only want to understand why you’re doing this.” 

Honerva gestured vaguely to the air around them. To the other paladins, it must have seemed like merely a dismissive wave of her hand. But Allura understood that Honerva was pointing to the cloud of universes swirling around them both. “The nature of reality is cruelty and suffering,” she said. “I thought I could find a world in which that wasn’t true, but now I see the truth. Happiness is a cruel deception. Pain is the leyline that runs through all realities, and the only way to end that pain is to embrace oblivion.”

Honerva flexed her hand, and the power of her quintessence warped the air around her. She pulled realities toward her like a black hole swallowing up galaxies. Instead of flashing by dizzyingly, they orbited her one by one - soldiers on a battlefield up to their ankles in blood, a woman lying prone with a man dropping toward her with a knife, a crowd screaming as the shockwave of an explosion rippled the ground beneath their feet, more and more until Allura lost track of the endless scenes of violence and death - and one by one they flickered and disappeared, their brutality negated by nothingness. 

“That is not your choice to make for all those people,” said Allura. 

Honerva huffed a little sigh, too exhausted to truly scoff at her naivete. “If they could understand, they would see it for the mercy that it is.” Her tone wasn’t combative. Allura found it difficult to maintain her anger at the witch who’d ruined so many lives. Honerva seemed very tired, and very sad, and off of that despair rolled a monstrous evil. 

Honerva had spoken the truth. It would be a waste to argue with her. 

Lance seemed to sense it, too, because his voice was soft when he said, “You’re right - there’s no escaping pain. I used to think love and happiness should come easy, because I’d always had them. My ignorance made me miss the ways the people around me were in pain every day. I even made it worse for them. But people can change. I changed. It might be slow, but the arc of the universe bends away from pain and towards kindness.” 

Pidge chimed in, “Some pain feels insurmountable. When the Galra took my family, I thought that loss would define me for the rest of my life. But if you live in that pain, you only give it room to grow. You have to accept it, and then imagine a future you’d want to live in anyway.” 

Hunk added, “I’m a simple guy. If something is broken, I repair it. If someone is hungry, I feed them. Not everything is that simple to fix, but the answer isn’t to throw the problem away. You’ve got to figure out how you can do the most good, even if it’s not something you ever thought you could do, or even that you would want to.” 

“All realities contain both joy and suffering,” said Shiro. Then, with more grace than Allura thought anyone would be capable of showing toward the architect of so much of his own pain, he allowed, “We have both had more than our fair share of suffering. But we can’t let that blind us to the good things left in the world.”

“When pain is your reality for long enough, it can seem like there’s nothing else, or that you don’t deserve better.” Keith leaned closer to Shiro and took his hand, their fingers lacing together. “But that can change when you least expect it. No matter how much bad you’re dealt, you have to hold out for the good, and protect it when it comes along.”

Each of them had spoken from the heart, but Honerva was clearly untouched. She didn’t even seem to be listening, instead watching the motes of light play about her head and observing realities winking out like sparks in cold air. To reach her, Allura would have to speak to _Honerva’s_ heart, so she invoked the only thing Honerva still loved, twisted and cruel though that love had become. 

“You’re doing this because of Lotor, aren’t you?” 

Honerva flinched. Her eyes flicked to meet Allura’s, and there was vulnerability in them that hadn’t been there before. 

“This won’t bring him back,” Allura said. “It won’t bring him peace. Will you make countless other Lotors suffer because you couldn’t save yours?”

“He won’t suffer,” said Honerva dubiously. 

“Isn’t the loss of all that potential its own kind of suffering? You love your son. I saw something in him, once, that I wanted to love. Glimpses of the good man he might have been. He deserved a chance to be that man.”

“Yes,” Honerva rasped, her stoicism melting into despair. “He did.” 

“And he still can.” Using all her strength of will, Allura replicated Honerva’s technique of pulling realities out of the din and bringing them to the fore. She focused them, using all the she’d learned in Oriande and from her father, twisting the thread of the universe around her hands to show Honerva her son. 

Realities flashed between them, each yielding an image from within their vastness: Lotor in thousands of permutations. Lotor, crowned in the palace at Daibazaal. Lotor, a confident grin on his face as he piloted an Altean fighter through a perilous asteroid field. Lotor, in the colorful and roughspun clothes of a traveler, laughing as he shared food with a motley assortment of aliens around a campfire. Lotor, approaching the Black Lion of Voltron with his hand outstretched, its force field falling in welcome to its paladin. Lotor on his wedding day, holding Allura’s hand. Lotor, older, placing a crown on the head of a young woman with violet skin and white hair and his own eyes. 

Lotor, happy. 

In some realities he was with Honerva. In some he was not. It was not her love or protection that made the difference. The happiest versions of him were the ones free to control their own destinies, and there were as many ways for him to be content and whole as there were realities for Allura to summon - endless. 

Holding all of Lotor’s possibility in her hands, even as some of them began to flicker, Allura intoned, “Beauty can arise out of adversity. From the loss of Daibazaal and Altea, other planets can thrive. Likewise, in spite of the tragedies of our reality, in a billion other worlds your son can have a different life. But only if you let it happen. Even within ourselves, we must let go of the past before the future can open to us. The old must give way to the new.”

Honerva watched the countless iterations of her son spin by her, orbiting her consciousness like a litany of her guilt. Her voice was very small as she said, shaking her head, “It’s too late.” 

“It isn’t,” Allura promised her. “You can still fix this. We can do it together.” 

“So many are already lost…” Even as she said it, dozens more realities winked out of existence. Allura’s vision was clearing, her hearing returning to normal. There were so few realities left. 

“I don’t mean to simply halt the damage,” said Allura. “I mean to reverse it. The fabric of realities remembers its shape, even in the face of destruction. With enough power, we can pull that memory back out.” She wouldn’t have thought it possible if she had not seen her father do it. With the power of Altean alchemy, he’d pulled her out of her double and the memory of her reality had made her a new body. 

Haggar shook her head. “We’re talking about entire realities. Neither of us has so much power, not even if we both used up everything we have. Perhaps if we tapped into the power of Oriande... but it’s gone now.” 

“We have the power of Oriande right here, as well as the power of the trans-reality comet.” She gestured to the lions of Voltron arrayed behind her. 

Pidge looked nervous. “You mean, you can use the lions like batteries to power your reaction? Will we have enough juice left to fly them home afterwards?”

“No,” said Keith, understanding immediately. “She’s going to use them up completely. They’ll be gone.” 

“No more lions? No more Voltron?” Lance looked devastated. But then he looked at Allura and smiled. “But if it’s the only way, then of course we have to give them up.” 

Hunk looked sadly up at the Yellow Lion. “Voltron always seemed so permanent. I never thought I’d outlast it.” 

“The lions have been good to us,” said Pidge. “But we’re more than paladins of Voltron. We can go on without them.” 

“It’s necessary for the mission,” said Keith. “Maybe this was always meant to be their final purpose.” 

Shiro said nothing, but looked up at the Black Lion with an intensity Allura couldn’t fathom. Perhaps he felt he didn’t have a say in this decision, since he wasn’t a paladin anymore.

Allura reached out to Honerva. “I can’t do it without you.” 

Honerva placed her hand - long-fingered, narrow, and far more delicate than expected - in Allura’s. “For Lotor, I will try.” 

They knelt together, hand in hand, drawing on the power of alchemy to weave around the remaining realities within their grasp and to hold the places of those that had already disappeared. It was as Allura had said: the imprint of those lost realities was still there. They only needed enough power to draw them back to life. 

The Blue Lion, ever eager to help, responded to Allura’s call - she could hear the low rumble of its voice and see the glowing eyes open within her mind. Her lion had been such a comfort to her, a connection back to her family and her homeland, and vindication of her fighting spirit when it finally accepted her as a Paladin in the same tradition as her father. She would miss it sorely. But clinging to the past at the expense of the present was no way to live. She would have to find a way forward without it, and rejoice in her heritage in new ways. Her pride as an Altean did not come from being a paladin. It was inside her. 

Lance stepped forward to place his hand on her shoulder, and Allura felt the Red Lion add its strength to her cause. Its power coursed through him, a living conduit, and she could feel the crackling energy in the connection they shared. For a boy who had always been so ambitious, yet so insecure, acceptance as a Blue, then Red, Paladin of Voltron had meant proof of his worth at last. But now his gratitude to the lions had been replaced by true confidence in himself. His faith in Voltron, replaced by faith in Allura. He gave the Red Lion to her, and Allura’s strength grew. 

Pidge was next to approach. As Allura felt the touch of her hand, she was struck by the warmth of Pidge’s gratitude. The Green Lion had been such a wonderful gift and, to a girl who formed relationships even with objects who didn’t have something akin to a soul, a fantastic friend. To Pidge, this sacrifice would be a loss akin to a death, but her grief was born from love. Allura could almost feel Pidge’s tears on her own cheeks as the Green Paladin shakily said, “Bye, girl.” 

Hunk was right behind Pidge. When his big, warm hand enveloped Allura’s shoulder, she felt a bloom of love so pure that it almost washed out the sadness that came with it. Despite all his misgivings, Hunk had met every challenge with steadfast honor, eager to rise to the expectations of his unasked-for responsibility - the true heart of Voltron. He understood that his mastery of the Yellow Lion had always been borrowed strength, so now he returned the gift to Allura, finally understanding that he had strength of his own to spare. 

There was a pause before Keith placed his hand tentatively between her shoulder blades. Allura had expected this sacrifice to be easiest for him out of them all. Keith was no stranger to change or loss, and he’d never been particularly sentimental about the Black Lion. He hadn’t even wanted it, at first. 

But from Keith, Allura was surprised to feel the most reluctance of them all. Only now, connected to him mind-to-mind by the power of her alchemy, did she finally understand: all his grief and pain had not hardened him, they had made him fragile in invisible ways. More than any of them, Keith had needed Voltron. The legend and history of it had given him a sense of permanence for the first time in his life - the feeling that he was part of something that had existed before him, and would exist after him. Something that would bind his little found family together, so even when he left and came back, they would still be waiting for him. 

Even now, after all they’d been through, some part of him feared that losing Voltron would mean losing them, too. So instead of simply taking in his emotions, Allura collected the thoughts of all the paladins and pulsed them back through the mental link toward him, showing Keith all their resilience and commitment and love. They may have built their bonds on Voltron’s framework, but they were strong enough now to stand without it. “We will never leave you,” she silently whispered, and Keith’s grip on the Black Lion loosened and released. 

But the Black Lion stayed silent, its eyes dull and lifeless, its power sequestered. 

“Keith…” said Allura, out loud this time. She could feel his willingness, but he must have still been holding back in some way. 

But no, that wasn’t it. Keith had the answer. “I can’t give permission alone. The Black Lion has another living paladin.” 

Of course. The Blue Lion had relinquished Lance in deference to Red’s claim on him, and Red had lost interest in Keith after he ascended to lead Voltron. But the Black Lion had always loved Shiro, and always would.

“Shiro?” said Allura.

Shiro was standing back, arms crossed, his face a practiced blank. Only when Keith reached out to him, inviting him in to the ritual, did his stoicism crack. Looking at his expression, Allura didn’t need a mental link to understand what it meant to him that now, at the ending of Voltron, he would counted among its paladins. 

He put his hand on Allura’s back, overlapping Keith’s, and the Black Lion opened its eyes. 

Power coursed through Allura, more power than she’d ever conducted before. Not the Balmera, nor the giant teludav, nor Oriande itself had ever asked so much of her. It burned her from the inside, rattling her atoms apart, and she would not have been able to bear it without Honerva there to share the burden. 

Allura felt the Blue Lion falter first, the wells of its quintessence run dry. Its star-metal turned to ordinary space rock, its colors dimming and its eyes darkening as the low hum of its engines quieted and died. She couldn’t help but turn and look at it one last time as it sagged and began to fall. But before it could collapse, it disintegrated into pieces as delicate as flakes of ash. 

One by one, the others followed. Her friends’ hands tightened on her shoulders as each felt the connection with their lion severed. But each particle of each lion, swirling by the millions in the void, shined and swelled as it kindled the light back into a fallen reality. Alfor’s final legacy, and Blaytz’s, and Trigel’s and Gyrgan’s, even Zarkon’s, were alive in this moment of mercy and renewal. Voltron, defender of Allura’s universe, would now become the salvation of all. 

When the lions were gone and Allura finally turned back around, she was startled to find Honerva hazy and indistinct before her. She was fading the same way the lions had, the tips of her hair and the edges of her outline breaking and separating as her substance came apart into quintessence, eaten alive by the reaction they’d started. Allura tried to save her, tried to pull the burden of their task onto herself to give Honerva a reprieve, but Honerva held tight to her end of the alchemical thread, taking on more and more until her body fell apart under the strain. She was doing it on purpose. 

“What are you doing?” Allura protested. 

“What little atonement I can make. I will stay behind and finish what we’ve started. It’s the only way for you to survive.” 

“We can both survive! We can do this together!” Even as she said it, Allura could tell it wasn’t true. Her own soul was thinning as the quintessence burned through her. If she kept this up, it wouldn’t be long before she followed the lions and Honerva into the void. 

Honerva was practically translucent now. Her voice was thin. “There is nothing left for me in our reality. Better to become some small part of all those realities where things turned out different.” 

Though Allura had thought she would be glad to see the Witch’s death, she unexpectedly found herself railing against it. In the end, Honerva was one more piece of Allura’s homeworld she would never be able to replace. “You are of Altea, a time before I knew. So much knowledge, so much history would die with you! You can come with us!”

Honerva shook her head. She was almost gone, her shape made up of shifting, disconnected pieces. “The old gives way,” she said, reaching out with her disintegrating hand to caress Allura’s cheek with a touch like a butterfly’s wing, “to the new.”

As the last of Honerva crumbled and was swept away, the liminal space around them disappeared like a soap bubble popping. Allura was suddenly outside her body, streaming through the quintessence field as pure energy, her disorientation and fear tempered by the warmth of her friends’ spirits traveling alongside her. All around them, sparks of quintessence coalesced and bloomed into realities, entire universes springing from the fertile ground of Voltron’s power like a meadow full of flowers. It was more beautiful than she could have imagined, more beautiful even than the juniberry fields she’d left behind in order to make it happen. A multiverse unfolded around them, an endless tesselation, forever and back to the beginning and forever once more. 

The paladins of what once had been Voltron rocketed through and between realities, their formless bodies remembering where they belonged just like each reality remembered how to exist. It was as if their foray into the multiverse had stretched a rubber band to its limit, and now the springback was carrying them home at breakneck speed. Allura huddled close to the others, trying not to get lost as they streamed through the abyss. 

But then, something caught her eye. Not one of the realities as they flashed by, but a twinkle of movement in the space between. Someone was out there in the quintessence field, a person’s shape… no, not a person. Allura’s perspective was off; the object was much larger and much farther away. A ship. 

Sincline. 

For a moment Allura thought she was seeing a figment made real only by her memory. Then she saw another shape appear, this one unmistakable - Voltron. Her heart leaped to see it whole once more, and as it clashed with Sincline she realized she was watching a moment from her own past. Their final battle with Lotor before leaving him behind in the quintessence field. 

Her attention pulled the scene closer, turned it inside out. She saw herself in the Blue Lion’s cockpit, righteous determination written all over her face. She saw her friends, pulling away from the brink of madness to flee back to their own reality. And she saw Lotor, abandoned to the world between worlds, descending from mania to despair to corruption, falling apart into a primordial ooze before her eyes like a video with the speed turned to maximum. And then she saw it all happen again. 

Somehow the quintessence field had held the imprint of this moment, and this tiny, cursed reality had been drawn back to life just like all the rest. It repeated over and over like sand falling through an ever-spinning hourglass, all its violence, loneliness, and death encapsulated in the void forever. 

Allura looked once more upon the face of the man who had held her heart in his hands before dashing it on the ground. She watched that face become unrecognizable. There was a time she might have called this justice. Now all she could think was what a terrible waste it was. Even Lotor’s crimes, unspeakable though they were, did not merit the end he’d suffered. 

Honerva hadn’t deserved to save her son. Her good intentions at the last could not erase all the harm she’d done. But Lotor did deserve to be saved. And despite all her hatred, Allura was the only one who could do it. 

As the scene looped once more, Allura reached out an incorporeal hand and touched the spinning hourglass, stopping it at the instant Voltron escaped the abyss, the first moment Lotor was alone. Suddenly she was inside Sincline’s cockpit. Lotor panted and snarled, delirious with bloodlust, but even in his madness he paused when he saw Allura. She didn’t know what she looked like to him, but he stared at her in confusion and hope. 

She took his hand. 

The stillness of the moment was broken by noise and pain as Allura was ripped out of sync with her friends. They’d been riding a highway back to their reality and now Allura was colliding with the shoulder, dragging herself across the barrier between worlds. She drifted farther and farther as Lotor’s weight anchored her to the quintessence field, threatening to pull her out there to be destroyed along with him. 

But just as she was about to slip away, strong hands grabbed her, steadying her and pulling her back toward the path home, refusing to let her be lost. She could feel Lance’s sparkling energy, Pidge’s fierce tenacity, Hunk’s warm steadfastness, Keith’s loyal protection, and Shiro’s shining heroism all wrapped around her, atoms intertwined. Lotor’s dragging weight stretched her thin as his rightful place in the quintessence field held on to him, but Allura held him tighter, and didn’t let him go even as they rushed toward a blinding light at the end of their trans-reality track.

The strain disappeared. Allura was back in her body. The blooming garden of realities before her eyes was replaced by the familiar bridge of IGF Altas, and the sensation of her friends’ spirits overlapping hers replaced by solid metal under her hands and knees. 

Lotor lay in front of her, unconscious, his hand still clasped in hers so tightly that her fingers were tingly and numb. She dropped him to whirl around, looking for… 

Lance. There he was right behind her, the dizziness on his face fading into a relieved grin as he picked himself up off the floor. They fell into each other’s arms, crying as they laughed. 

As they embraced, Allura looked over Lance’s shoulder to find Hunk sitting up and rubbing his head, and Pidge scrambling to her feet. Up on the captain’s platform Shiro and Keith tried to rise only to find themselves so tangled together that they fell back to the floor, laughing and holding each other. 

As the bridge crew looked on in confusion, murmuring amongst themselves and reaching out toward the paladins as if to confirm they were real, Allura turned to look out the front viewscreen. There was the portal, its structure ruined, its power nodes darkened. The doorway between realities closed forever. Its broken pieces drifted apart, ricocheting gently off the hulls of the surrounding Coalition fleet. 

They were back in their own reality. 

The war was won. 

The lions were gone.


	8. Three years later

Allura woke to a quiet house. 

The silence seemed to reverberate within the curved, white walls with their soft blue accents. As Allura got up, the only sound was her slippered feet tapping across the floor. An automatic door whooshed open at her approach to let her through into the kitchen, and an electric kettle added its hum to the ambient noise as Allura heated up some water for tea. 

Her house was cozy and inviting, built and decorated in the style of the Altean architecture she’d grown up with, but on a much humbler scale than her old palace or the lost castle-ship. Closed doors led to covered walkways and corridors, connecting the house to a little cluster of others like it. Those houses were quiet, too. Allura could see them through her windows, dark and empty. 

To combat the loneliness, she tapped on the radio before going back into her room to get dressed and do her hair. The jangly music drifting through the open doorway kept her company as she twisted her forelocks and tucked them behind her ears. When she opened her closet, she glanced longingly at the clothes tucked away in the back that she hadn’t been able to wear for months. Finally she chose a dress Coran had made for her to fit over her hugely pregnant belly. She admired its beautiful lines and colors in her mirror. Coran was determined that she feel no less elegant for her new, wider shape. 

Back in the kitchen, the kettle had switched itself off. She poured the steaming water into a pot and, while she waited for her tea to steep, checked on her little window box full of juniberry flowers. They didn’t grow very well in this atmosphere, no matter how hard she worked to keep them healthy, but what few managed to survive were as beautiful and sweet-smelling as she remembered from her childhood. She pulled her chair close to the window so she could enjoy them as she sipped her tea. 

Allura left the house earlier than she normally would have to give herself plenty of time to waddle down the road and into town. She caught the hover tram and sat next to the window, the better to enjoy the way the city opened up beneath her as she rose. There was the little cluster of houses she’d come from, and nearby another, all connected by narrow roads that fed into larger avenues as houses became neighborhoods became districts became the city of New Altea. 

After the war, there hadn’t been enough remaining Alteans to safely colonize a self-sustaining planet. Instead, they’d founded a city on Earth, and the humans had accepted them with open arms. Allura had had visions of replicating the capitol city of the original Altea, but that dream had quickly proved itself too ambitious. The materials and geography of Earth could not support true Altean architecture, nor could their budget and labor force. 

Besides, New Altea wasn’t only for Alteans. Many human refugees had arrived here throughout the years, people whose homes had been destroyed in the Galra invasion and now had nowhere else to go. Compromise and collaboration had produced a city that was a heartening mix of human and Altean sensibilities, with a population to match. It was both familiar, and something completely unique. 

From up here, Allura could easily spot the park with the monument to those lost in the war. She had to squint and shield her eyes to find the spaceport out toward the edge of town, but she finally pinpointed it by following the trajectory of a passenger transport as it broke atmo and came in for a landing. Meanwhile, the tram passed just above the academy where Allura frequently taught a small class of magically-inclined Alteans. Their numbers had been decimated by Lotor’s culling, but there were enough left that Allura had hope for the future of Altean alchemy.

The city was laid out in the Altean style, a study in circles. The main thoroughfares spread out through the city like the spokes of a wheel, and at their hub towered the Coalition base. That was where Allura was headed now. 

New Altea had become the first permanent home for the Intergalactic Coalition in the wake of its victory against the Galra Empire, and it remained a waypoint for refugees and veterans of the war as well as a partner with the local Galaxy Garrison. The base was the center of all their combined efforts - part research facility, part training center, part space program. Very little of the Garrison’s military influence remained. New Altea had embraced its hard-won peacetime wholeheartedly. 

Allura exited the tram just in front of the Coalition base’s doors, and took a deep breath before shuffling forward, holding her belly. In some ways, she was grateful to her little passenger for forcing her to slow down these last few months, as it had given her a chance to reflect and appreciate all the incredible progress they’d made. In other ways, she was looking forward to being able to see her feet again. 

Allura paused before going inside to glance at the enormous landing pad attached to the base complex. It was empty. Frowning, Allura peered up at the sky in hopes that something other than a small shuttle or transport would break through the clouds. Atlas was supposed to have docked this morning, and while it wasn’t uncommon for them to be delayed (Allura knew better than anyone what sorts of unexpected obstacles one could encounter on a deep space mission) it was still disappointing that its crew weren’t here to greet her. 

While she stood there forlornly, the door popped open in front of her. Romelle’s pigtails bounced as she waved Allura inside. 

“You don’t have to do that,” Allura protested as she gratefully waddled through the doorway. She wasn’t impressed with the way everyone was bending over backwards for her now that she was huge, but on the other hand these doors were heavy.

Romelle scoffed, “Just humor me. It’s my honor to pay deference to the Altean queen when she’s carrying the future of our people!” 

“I’m not a queen!” Allura sputtered. Romelle just laughed. Her playful teasing had escalated as Allura’s belly had grown. 

“Fine, just the Altean senator to the Intergalactic Coalition,” Romelle allowed, still giggling. “The teludav is all warmed up for you. Go fetch your king.”

Allura rolled her eyes, but couldn’t help smiling as she took the lift up to the level that held the teludav. It wasn’t as elegant a machine as the one from the castle-ship, but over the years they’d fine-tuned it until it worked almost as well. Allura was still the only one who could use it, but a couple of her older students were showing real affinity for it. She would probably hand over teleportation duties to one of them after she gave birth. 

The teludav’s platform and controls raised out of the floor at Allura’s approach. She carefully took up her stance, shifting to find her balance, and rested her hands on the pillars. Energy warmed her palms. As Romelle had said, its core was already powered and awaiting her command. So much easier than during the war, when she’d run the teludav alone using her own vital energy as fuel. 

A glowing blue portal, just big enough for a human, unfurled in front of her. Though the weather in New Altea was mild and comfortable, she felt a burst of even warmer air as a sea breeze filtered through the opening. Allura tingled as she recognized the familiar smell and joyful sounds of Lance’s family home in Cuba. She could see her in-laws through the portal; they jumped at the sudden appearance, but then waved happily to her. She couldn’t take her hands off the pillars, but she answered them with a wide, genuine smile and called, “Is Lance ready to go?” 

Her mother-in-law ran inside, shouting, “I told you it was almost time! Now you’re keeping your pregnant wife waiting! Go go go!” Lance soon appeared, a duffel bag over his shoulder, dodging a swinging chancla. 

Once he was safely at the portal and his mother had backed off, he shouted a quick goodbye over his shoulder and stepped through to Allura’s side. There was no need for prolonged goodbyes. No matter the distance, he could see them whenever he wanted. 

Allura lifted her hands from the pillars, letting the portal collapse, and put her arms around her husband instead. He’d only been gone for a few days, but it was good to have him back at her side. “I wish I could have been there!” she groaned. They were still working on portable teleportation technology, and there was no teludav station in Cuba, so if Allura had gone she would have had to take an airplane. No one had wanted to risk her going into labor at thirty-five thousand feet. 

“We would have loved to have you,” said Lance, kissing her cheek. “But it’s probably for the best. With all the aliens there, the reception almost turned into a diplomatic mission. If they’d caught you it would have turned into more work than vacation.” 

Allura nodded knowingly. Even though Voltron was gone, everywhere they went people were excited to talk to its former paladins. She turned her head to catch Lance’s mouth, and turned his chaste kiss into a deep, lingering one. “How was the wedding?” she murmured as they finally broke apart. 

Lance pulled away so Allura could see his gorgeous grin. “It was great! Veronica was so happy, and I think I actually caught Acxa smiling one time! You know, I overheard my abuela harassing my cousin about when he was going to find a pretty alien girl to marry. I think we’re setting unrealistic expectations.” 

Allura laughed and rested her head on Lance’s shoulder once more, enjoying the closeness for another moment before pushing him away. “Stand back. It’s almost time for the next one.” 

This time, she reached deep into the leylines of the cosmos to open a portal much farther from home. The aperture revealed metallic, riveted walls and harsh artificial lights, and instead of the warm, salty Cuban breeze Allura breathed in a puff of climate-controlled, recycled air. But there was no waiting this time, because Pidge bounded through almost immediately, dragging her luggage and computer setup behind her. 

Lance greeted her with a hug as Allura closed the portal behind her. “How was your research trip?” he said. 

“Awesome!” said a beaming Pidge. “Next time there should be enough data to run some projections. But the observation window is closed for now, so I’ll stay home for a couple of phoebs this time.” 

While they talked, Allura opened a third portal, this time to the Balmera she’d helped liberate all those years ago. The crystal-studded ground rumbled in recognition of her, and Hunk jogged through backwards while waving goodbye to Shay. 

“Thanks, Allura!” he chirped. He gave her an uncharacteristically delicate hug, mindful of her protruding belly, and clasped Lance’s hand in greeting before turning excitedly toward Pidge. “Did your probe make it back?”

Pidge bounded forward and the two of them were soon off on an animated rant, talking over each other as they gushed about their latest project. “Yeah, it came in last movement! I caught the moment of supernova, and the rest of the probes are still collecting data on the newly-formed black hole. It’s been over a year of scoping and monitoring red giants and it’s finally paying off!”

Hunk was practically clapping his hands with excitement. “This data is going to change physics as we know it! I can’t wait to get a look at those readings!” 

“Right?! Even the preliminary scans are fascinating. This could have repercussions for all space travel technology, faster-than-light travel, even teleportation! Imagine nailing down the math behind a wormhole tight enough that you could write a program to do it instead of relying on…”

Pidge stopped suddenly, and both she and Hunk looked to Allura sheepishly as they realized they were on the verge of insulting the teludav. Allura smiled and shook her head to show them she didn’t mind, and she continued winding down the machine as the others picked their conversation back up where they’d left it. 

Nothing would make Allura happier than for Pidge to revolutionize teleportation technology, just as she would be happier still for the next generation of humans to take her advancements even further. As the humans pushed themselves to new heights, so did the Alteans - already Allura’s young pupils were doing things with alchemy that her father would never have imagined. Allura had spent so long anticipating a slow decline to extinction for her people, but now they were thriving alongside the humans, each of them bringing out the best in each other. There was no point in clinging to the past when the future was so bright. 

One day Allura, too, would become the old giving way to someone else’s new. But not just yet. 

They crammed into the lift together and headed downstairs, Lance with his face happily buried in Allura’s cloud of hair and Pidge still double-checking her data on a handheld computer. Hunk peeked out the window to see the empty landing platform below, and frowned. “I thought Atlas was supposed to be here by now,” he said. 

Allura sighed. “It was.” 

“Don’t worry about them,” said Lance from inside Allura’s hair. “Shiro is better now about not getting into trouble all the time, and Keith is still just as good at getting them _out_ of trouble as he always was. They’ll be here.” 

Lance was soon proven right by a rising roar of massive engines that crescendoed as they stepped outside. They all looked up in time to see the clouds part around a distant, approaching light. As it drew closer Allura could make out its shape - a great white ship, proud lines and blazing engines. 

“There they are!” Pidge shouted, running toward the landing platform. The others followed close behind, pausing behind the barrier until the ship settled onto the platform and cut its engines with a low whine. 

By the time its crew began to disembark, others from the city had congregated to greet them. This was Atlas’s home port, and most of the crew had family here. Though their missions sometimes lasted months as they explored the far reaches of space and acted as a peacekeeping force within the Coalition, New Altea always eagerly awaited their return. 

There was laughing and happy chatter as crew members found their friends and family in the crowd. Allura kept her eye on the gangplank, waiting for the command team to appear. Finally she spotted someone she recognized from the bridge crew, then another, and another, and bringing up the rear were two figures walking side by side. 

The sea of people parted for them, salutes thrown in their wake. Shiro, every inch the admiral of Earth’s space fleet in a pressed Coalition uniform, greeted each crew member as he passed through the crowd, extending encouragement and congratulations for jobs well done after a long and arduous mission. Following close behind and just to Shiro’s right was Keith, still in his flight suit with the commander patch visible over his breast. Though his clothes weren’t as impeccable as Shiro’s and his long braid was messy, his posture and alert eyes dared anyone to challenge him. He spoke little, but he did greet a few out of the crowd with even more familiarity and ease than Shiro showed to his crew - mostly Galra and Galra hybrids wearing Keith’s same style of flight suit and looking similarly ruffled. 

The pair soon spotted Allura and the others, unmistakable with Pidge on Hunk’s shoulders waving above the crowd. They weaved their way to the edge of the platform and were greeted with laughter and hugs. 

“You’re late,” Allura told Keith as they embraced. 

“Take it up with the admiral here,” said Keith, jerking his thumb at Shiro. “I’m just the hired muscle.” 

“Looks like that muscle came in handy on this trip?” said Hunk, pinching Keith’s flight suit and rubbing at a scorch mark on the fabric. 

Shiro’s prosthetic hand nearly enveloped Keith’s narrow shoulder as he bragged, “We got held up by an ambush of old Empire sympathizers. These ones were actually pretty well organized - they managed to disable our main thrusters before we could pinpoint where the attack was coming from. But they were no match for Keith’s squadron.” 

“You’re getting slow in your old age,” said Keith with a cheeky smile. “Time was, you would have been fast enough to avoid losing those thrusters.”

“Or maybe I just wanted to give you a chance to show off.” 

Keith rolled his eyes, still smiling. “Sure, thanks for that, I love getting shot at!” 

As they all climbed down from the platform’s edge, Allura noticed that Shiro and Keith’s postures had relaxed into something more casual. Shiro unbuttoned the collar of his uniform, and Keith stepped forward to walk beside him instead of shadowing him like a bodyguard. It didn’t take long for their hands to swing into each other and grab hold, fingers lacing together with practiced ease. 

Allura wasn’t sure how they managed to stay so professional while on duty. She’d heard there were even members of their own crew who hadn’t worked out yet that the admiral and his commander were involved. 

As the group broke away from the crowd, they spaced out and paired off to begin catching up in earnest. Hunk and Lance’s schedules hadn’t matched up in some time, so they excitedly traded photos of their latest vacations and missions - Hunk was soon cooing over wedding pictures while Lance tried to name even one single dish on the table at the diplomatic summit Hunk had attended last phoeb. (“They said I was an ambassador, not a caterer, and they didn’t let me in the kitchen,” Hunk pouted.) 

Pidge skipped along beside Shiro, who assured her that Matt and her parents were doing well. “We dropped them off at the outpost on our way into the Sol system,” said Shiro. “They should have just enough time to get their samples before we pick them up again on our way back out.” 

“My research is going to blow Matt’s out of the water!” Pidge promised, showing Shiro the readings on her handheld while he looked dazed and nodded agreeably. 

That left Allura to walk beside Keith. After some polite small talk they fell into a comfortable silence and listened to their friends chatter around them instead. Keith only showed his consideration by slowing to match Allura’s pace, wordlessly reminding Shiro and, by extension, the rest of the group to do so as well. 

“This mission took you through Galra space, didn’t it?” Allura finally asked. “Did you visit Kolivan?” 

“Yeah, we passed pretty close to the station, so we stopped over for a day to refuel.” 

The “station” was the new headquarters of the Galra Alliance, an aggregate member of the Coalition made up of the Galra factions who had accepted Kolivan’s rule and pledged peace and unity with their surrounding systems. Now, instead of an ever-expanding empire, they inhabited a few planets and one giant space station which served as Kolivan’s seat of power.

Kolivan hadn’t wanted the job, of course. The Coalition had tried to nominate Keith, but he’d balked at the idea of leading an entire species. When Keith had put forward Kolivan’s name, the erstwhile Marmora general had been unable to refuse. By all accounts, he was doing a terrific job of keeping the Galra from disparate units, backgrounds, and ranking systems in something resembling harmony while guiding the development of a new Galra culture not based on conquest as it was for so many thousands of years. 

And that was not Kolivan’s only job. His space station also housed a small prison reserved for the Galra war criminals they’d managed to round up. Including… 

“How’s Lotor?” 

Keith tensed at the question, though Allura was careful to keep her voice neutral. She knew Keith and Shiro had begun visiting Lotor in prison. She couldn’t imagine what they had to talk about, but she supposed Keith had developed something of an affinity for his fellow half-Galra while Shiro perhaps had sympathy for another of Honerva’s victims. Allura didn’t want to know the details of their conversations. After all, it was none of her business anymore. After the war, there had been talk of Lotor facing justice at the hands of the Alteans he’d deceived and exploited, but Allura had put her own feelings aside and advocated for him to be turned over to the Galra instead. 

Altea needed to look to its own future, not bog itself down in vengeance and retribution. Allura cared only that Lotor was alive, and that he wasn’t suffering. Beyond that, she had little interest in the life she’d risked her own existence to pluck from the abyss. She did not begrudge Keith and Shiro the camaraderie they’d found with him, but she doubted she’d ever be tempted to see him again. She had her own life now. 

“He’s well,” said Keith nervously. 

Allura smiled to assure him the question was sincere. “Good,” she said, and was pleased to find that she meant it. 

The tram carried the six of them back to the neighborhood Allura had come from, and they walked unhurriedly down the narrow streets toward their cluster of houses. The conversation never stopped, with Shiro telling stories from their latest mission and Pidge lamenting the lack of good food on her research station. Lance was teasing Hunk now, earning squawks of, “No, me and Shay did not get secretly married while I was away,” and, “NO, this is _not_ just like Keith and Shiro all over again!” 

Soon the empty house Allura had woken up in would be alive with chatter, thick with the smell of home cooking, and warm with the crowd of good company. She wouldn’t go to bed alone tonight, and when she woke up tomorrow everyone precious to her would be within her reach. They were all such different people, each with their own path in life to tread, but they were bound together by a force of love that would never be broken. It pulled them back together no matter how far any one of them strayed. 

“You okay?” said Lance, jogging back to Allura’s side as she began to fall behind. 

She beamed, and she could almost feel the marks on her cheeks glowing with the power of the happiness welling within her. “Perfect.” 

Allura’s family was home.


End file.
